BWF World Championships 2007

1:18am - 21 August 2007 - 318 views -
Posted in: Events

A few days back, I went to watch the World Badminton Championships in Stadium Putra, Bukit Jalil which happens to be within walking distance from my place. I’m not that big a badminton fan, I just figured that it would be a good experience to witness live badminton at least once (after much prodding from *cough* a hardcore badminton fan). So I chose to go for the quarter and semi-finals, because I wasn’t expecting Malaysia to be playing in the finals… and I was right.

Anyway, I had a hard time taking pictures of all the action and this time I have to blame my hardware, something I never like to do. There wasn’t anything I could do about it as my miserable Olympus mju 410 did not have a quick enough shutter speed no matter what settings I tried. I had no choice but to take pictures of the players when they were standing still, otherwise they would just be a blur.

This was stationed outside the stadium, first time I ever saw something like that. It made me hungry before the games even started. The white bearded man is evil.

I’ve never been to Stadium Putra before, despite the fact that I stay so close to it but everything there felt familiar, because I literally see them everyday (from afar, but still). The games started at exactly the stipulated time, something which you seldom see in Malaysia! In fact I was almost late on the first day because me and my friends weren’t expecting the huge amount of people there. On the second day we knew better so we parked our cars outside of the stadium and walked in. It was a lot quicker and coming out was a lot easier.

The following pictures are not arranged chronologically because I’m too lazy

Malaysia’s men’s doubles Koo Kien Keat & Tan Boon Heong vs Japan’s Sakamoto Shuichi & Ikeda Shintaro. We lost the match but it was an incredible one. The Japanese played brilliantly and we ended applauding them!

Denmark’s Peter Gade vs Indonesia’s Sony Dwi Kuncoro. Peter Gade wasn’t as good as I expected him to be and lost to Sony in a straight match, and he even got himself a yellow card on the way.

China’s Lin Dan vs China’s Bao Chun Lai. Lin Dan beat Bao easily. In fact he beat everyone else easily and won the Men’s Singles.

Malaysia’s Wong Mew Choo vs China’s Zhu Lin. Mew Choo lost despite putting up a good fight and managed to force a rubber game from a game down. A great effort considering Zhu Lin won the Women’s Singles.

Malaysia’s Choong Tan Fook and Lee Wan Wah vs Indonesia’s Kido Markis and Setiawan Hendra. The entire match was riddled with errors from both sides. It wasn’t as exciting to watch as the match between our doubles and the Japanese doubles.

There are far more matches played in the two days - totalling 30 but I wasn’t in much of a mood to take pictures because it was difficult to get a good shot. I had much better luck with my friend’s dSLR but the pictures I took are with him.

Since I couldn’t take much of the action, I took pictures from inside the stadium and stitched them together. It’s a pretty big place, but whether or not it could fit the advertised 16,000 people I’m still not too sure.

It was pretty good fun to be able to experience live badminton, and feeling the energy in the crowd. But then again, I was there to experience first-hand the incivility of some people. Some may call it patriotism, but patriotism or not, they’ve taken their actions too far. If only they’re put in a foreign country with a 5000-strong crowd booing at them for almost no apparent reason besides the fact that they are merely the opponents of the supporting crowd’s team and calling them names with personal insults, maybe they won’t be so retarded anymore.

I don’t usually like big events with massive crowds, nevertheless this time it wasn’t all that bad.