Badminton on Dutch television: Unknown, unloved
door redactie | 16-02-2012 om 22:58 uur
On August 14, 2011 the Chinese idol Lin Dan played the Malaysian world's number one Lee Chong Wei in the thrilling final of the World Badminton Championships in London. After one and a half hour of play Lin Dan forced the victory.
Unfortunately, this whole event wasn’t televised on the Dutch television. While these Asian badmintonstars were playing one of the best matches ever seen, Eurosport 2 was broadcasting a game of dominoes.
In this essay, I would like to show how badminton is being under-appreciated by the Dutch media. There are more than 55.000 players registered with Badminton Nederland, the Dutch badminton association. This is not comparable with the football association (more than 1 million members) or the tennis association (around 700.000 members). These sports are much more seen on television or in newspapers. The question is, do these sports obtain more broadcasting time due to the larger number of people playing these games or the other way around? Probably these two influence each other.
According to a report from NOC*NSF, the overall coordinating Dutch sports organization, only 2.5 hours of the total 2.700 hours sport broadcasting time were spent on badminton. Football and tennis could respectively more than 900 hours and 200 hours be seen on television. These differences are enormous.
In sum, it's my opinion that badminton is much too little broadcasted on Dutch television. Tournaments from all over the world are broadcast on www.badmintonworld.tv. This website is really worth visiting. Search especially for the final between Lin Dan and Lee Chong Wei. Then you can judge yourself.
Pepijn de Lange
Klas VWO 5B
Lyceum Bisschop Bekkers
Eindhoven
