Badminton’s biggest Asiad detractor – Poor broadcast, no streams, too many ads

Treesa-Gayatri during the Asian Games on the left and Televisions on the right. (FILE photo)

4 min readSep 27, 2026 08:55 AM IST First published on: Sep 27, 2026 at 08:54 AM IST

Danish commentator Steen Pederson lost visuals at 17-11 of Indonesia’s third singles player Ubaidillah handing Chinese Weng Hong Yang a defeat in the Badminton Men’s Team final at Asian Games. It is not in his nature to get livid, so he was merely amused. But the Games stream arbitrarily shifted to something else just when things got interesting, and it ended in a 3-2 shock win for Indonesia from 0-2 down.

In Korea, they woke up to the sudden realisation that the rest of the world often tuned in to watch their ridiculously dominant world-beater An Se-young. But when she took on Japanese Akane Yamaguchi in a heavy-duty team clash, there was outrage over why Korean terrestrial TV channels — the only good way to watch sport — had no badminton. It’s very belated but the Japan-Korea rivalry and high-quality contests, have takers that the sport and its custodians refuse to acknowledge, let alone address.