Olympics|Badminton’s Shuttleco*ck: Sports Gear’s Rare Bird
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By Ken Belson
It has 16 goose feathers, sits on a stump of Portuguese cork and flies at up to 300 miles per hour, which makes the badminton shuttleco*ck one of the more curious pieces of sports equipment to be found anywhere.
And there’s this: Shuttleco*cks, or shuttles for short, weigh only a few grams but must be durable enough to keep their shape even after players whack them as hard as they can.
In backyards around the world, badminton players often hit heavier, plastic shuttles that are designed to endure the constant abuse of amateurs. Professional shuttles, on the other hand, are made with demanding craftsmanship, and those are the ones that end up at the Olympics.
Yonex, which provides most of the badminton equipment being used at the Rio Games, shipped nearly 15,000 F-90 shuttles to Brazil from its factory outside Tokyo. Fans in the stands and viewers watching on television have no way of telling, but Yonex included four grades of shuttles, from slow to fast, that are deployed based on the conditions at the badminton venue, a boxy convention space with ceilings almost 40 feet high.
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The shuttles vary in weight ever so slightly, and counterintuitively, the lighter shuttles fly slower because they wobble more. Which is where the science comes in.
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