A comparison between Talent Identification and Development (TID) for badminton in China and the UK

Abstract

Badminton England created the first world badminton championship in 1898, known as the All England Badminton Championship. Since 1992 badminton has been an Olympic sport consisting of five disciplines, with fifteen badminton medals offered at each Olympic Games. Great Britain (GB) badminton won two Olympic medals between 2000 and 2008. China Badminton won 38 Olympic medals between 1992 and 2012. This leads to a number of questions, not least of which is to understand the success of China Badminton when compared with GB badminton, and the reasons behind that success.

The research set out below is a study into badminton talent identification and development (TID) in China and the United Kingdom (UK). The study compares and contrasts the relative success of the systems used in China and the UK, discussing the similarities and differences in both country’s badminton TID programmes.

This research followed a mixed methodology using three different types of research. These included documentary analysis of both countries’ sports systems and badminton programmes from an existing wide range of documentation. A total of forty Chinese and British national badminton players participated in the questionnaire survey. Eight national coaches from both countries were chosen for semi-structured interviews.

The results indicated significant differences in the application of TID in badminton in both countries: • The sport system’s impact on athlete’s development opportunities; • Differences in the identification of badminton talent progress; based on age and testing; • Differences in player development; training age, training hours and training years; • The age at which players specialise in badminton and the age at which they reach peak performance.

This research presents world class badminton players’ comments on the attributes they considered were important to success. This study shows that specialisation in badminton at an early age and building up both the quantity and quality of training can have a long term beneficial effect on individual performance. This is complemented by the findings of this study that confirmed the importance of talent identification (TI) and talent development (TD) in high-performance badminton programmes. Therefore, to achieve success at an international level requires a player to specialise in badminton early in their life coupled with many hours of directed training.