A new celebrity badminton player....Medvedev!

Who'd have thought the Russian president would know how to play? To be honest, he does have room for improvement but any support for our game is welcome!

More badminton videos here.

An interesting badminton video: a documentary about badminton's place in Malaysian culture (part 1 of 2), by filmmaker Rob Hardcastle - as he points out, Malaysians play badminton from age 6 to 66. Features Wong Choong Hann and Lee Wan Wah.

Never seen anything like this! A record breaking 10 shuttlecocks being juggled

Also see my article about record breaking badminton smashes.

A useful chart explaining the differences between the bewildering range of Yonex badminton rackets, from Paul Stewart's excellent badminton coach website.

Just found a beautifully illustrated history of the shuttlecock on the Badminton Association of Thailand's website.

It's a bit of an epic, starting in 7th Century China, via Japan, India, Native America and Europe, finally finishing off in 19th Century Colonial India.  I think it says that  a lot of the material was unearthed by a Swiss researcher looking into the early history of football (it seems that shuttlecocks used to be kicked around in many ancient cultures).

However it's all in Thai so I'm only getting the gist of it, thanks to Google translate.  But the pictures are fantastic!

Want to play badminton? There's an app for that...

Anyone played it?

What is racketlon?

 

Racketlon is the sport in which you play your opponent in each of the four racket-sports, table tennis, badminton, squash and tennis one after the other. You play the same number of points in each sport, giving equal weight to each sport. The rules of each sport are kept within each individual set and every point counts. The winner is the best all round racket player.

World History

More recently, the ERA has entered into a commercial relationship with TotallySporty.com, which aims to help Londoners to find sports partners & has featured racketlon as a sport of the month.

 

A bizarre idea - but wouldn't it be great to have a pro version, with Roger Federer competing against Lin Dan?