The final countdown
Filed Under Shower Curtain | Posted on March 17, 2008
Gail Emms sits on the floor of the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham, England. It is 8.30pm, but still the grunts and groans of competition emanate from behind a thick black curtain to her right, as they have since 10.30 that morning.Emms and mixed-doubles partner Nathan Robertson have just breezed through their first-round match at the All England Open, one of badminton top tournaments. The win took all of 26 minutes, leaving the vivacious blonde 30-year-old still fresh as a daisy.Her women doubles match that afternoon had had a different outcome, however. t was like playing against a brick wall,?she says of the Indonesian pair who got the better of her and partner Donna Kellogg in a notably hard-hitting encounter.It is now three and a half years since Britons Gail Emms and Nathan Robertson won silver at the Athens Olympics and reminded UK sports fans what a gripping game badminton can be. An impressive 4.5m viewers watched transfixed as the pair recovered from a calamitous first set to run the Chinese pair Zhang Jun and Gao Ling desperately close in the Olympic final.With the 2008 Olympic Games just a few months away, is it all now about Beijing? o be honest, it been about Beijing for two years,?she replies. e won the world championships in 2006 and then it was like, h, wee won everything that we wanted to win?… You know everything has been ticked off and it like ell what do you want to win now? The Olympics?… It has been hard, actually. It quite hard when youe got a countdown of two years.?/p>It will be hard, too, to go one better than in the 2004 Athens Games. Taking gold in 2008 will entail going to the country that dominates the sport. Li Yongbo, the Chinese head coach, described to me as he Sir Alex Ferguson of badminton? has served notice of his Olympic ambitions. think five isn too much to expect,?he said when asked recently about his gold medal hopes. Dauntingly enough, China started the Birmingham tournament with all five top seeds, though it won only two titles.bviously I wouldn be surprised if they sweep the board,?Emms, who is as feisty on court as she is charming off it, acknow-ledges. ut I wouldn put money on it … I think there a lot of pressure on them ?a hell of a lot of pressure ?and some of them will falter.?/span> At least she and Robertson know exactly what to expect. Habitus of 12-hour flights in this Asia-dominated sport, they have played in China any timeshe crowds are amazing, really really passionate and quite noisy,?she says. hey love their badminton … It quite scary sometimes.?/p>Though at 30 the pair could be considered veterans, Emms has no doubt that she and Robertson are better than in 2004. od yeah,?she says. e especially ?Ie improved loads in four years. Four years ago always felt I was catching up with Nathan, whereas now I feel on a par.?/p>The trouble is, standards generally are soaring. he crazy thing is, everyone is training harder than theye ever trained,?she says. e [Britain] have got players playing the best theye ever played, yet there are not many of us getting through the later stages of tournaments and winning medalsîš«veryone else is getting stronger, quicker.?/p>Sure enough, three days after we speak, Emms and Robertson are eliminated in the All England semi-finals by the Indonesian pairing of Nova Widianto and Lilyana Natsir. They in turn lose the final to Gao Ling and Zheng Bo, her new partner. The only non-Asian player to reach a final at the tournament in Birmingham is Denmark Tine Rasmussen, who wins the women singles.After 26 years playing the sport, it is natural that Emms mind should have started to drift beyond badminton. She says she will retire from international tournaments after Beijing and is looking forward, among other things, to taking riding lessons. want to retire at the top,?she says. could carry on, but I just think, Il be 35 [come the next Olympics], will I be at my best? I don know … Then youe got to start another life. I think it a perfect age to get my teeth into another project.?/p>Emms will not be lost to the sport entirely, however. She talks about working more on the development of younger players and clearly wants Britain to excel when the Olympics come to London in 2012. want us to do well, I檓 really passionate about that,?she says. want us to put on an amazing performance. think Beijing will show what [the Chinese] want to do on their home ground and wee got to learn from that. I don want us to put on an Olympics and then it all just go pear-shaped.?/p>If she brings anything like as much guile and fighting spirit to her post-playing career as she routinely displays at the net, Emms could be as big an asset for Britain Olympic team in 2012 as in 2008.
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