Badminton Shuttlecock Crisis.
Badminton, of all things, is having a moment. Not a glorious one, mind you, but a slightly awkward, faintly ridiculous sort of crisis. The problem is not scandal or corruption or even poor umpiring. It is goose feathers. Actual goose feathers.
At the top level of the sport, shuttlecocks are not plastic. They are made, rather precisely, from sixteen feathers, all taken from the same side of a goose, usually the left wing, because apparently even birds must comply with aerodynamic consistency. For years this has worked perfectly well, quietly, without fuss. And then, as so often happens in our…
The skinny
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