My favourite sport begins with a quiet contradiction. Before a single shuttle is struck, the umpire calls “Love all,” which in badminton simply means nobody has scored, that we are level, that we begin from nothing and, oddly, from love. Some of the most useful lessons from badminton arrived not through winning but through this strange opening ritual, a reminder that every contest rests on a shared agreement to start as equals. I have spent years watching how quickly that equality curdles into rivalry, on the court and far beyond it. The question that follows me off the court is simple and uncomfortable: if we always start at love all, how do we end up hating each other?
The game that begins at love
In badminton, the umpire opens every match with two words that sound almost tender. “Love all.” It is not sentiment. In racket sports, love means zero, and the call simply tells both players that no one has scored. The origin of the word is debated. One popular theory traces it to the French l’oeuf, the egg, whose rounded shape resembles a nought, while another suggests that to play “for love” once meant to play for nothing at all. Either way, the effect on me is the same. However fierce the match later becomes, it is built on a quiet declaration that we begin as equals, owing each other nothing but a fair contest.
There is something almost contemplative in that. We arrive at the net carrying our egos, our rankings, our private need to win, and the first thing the game does is strip all of it back to zero.
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee
My opponent was never my enemy
You cannot rally alone. This is the first honest thing the sport teaches. A wall will return the shuttle, but it will not surprise you, stretch you, or expose the weakness in your backhand. Only another person can do that. The player on the other side of the net is not an obstacle to my improvement. He is the condition of it.
I think of a man I used to play most weekends, older than me, deceptively still, the kind of opponent who barely seems to move yet is always exactly where the shuttle lands. He beat me for the better part of a year. I resented it before I understood it. What he was really doing, point after point, was showing me where my patience ran out. The people who defeat us cleanly often teach us more than the ones who let us win.
Neuroscience offers a tidy explanation for the strange intimacy of a good rally. Our brains contain mirror systems that fire both when we act and when we watch someone else act, which is partly why skilled players seem to read each other’s intentions before the body has fully committed. At a deeper level, a long rally is two nervous systems attuning to each other in real time, a kind of co-regulation we usually reserve for people we trust. It is hard to fully hate someone whose movements you are tracking that closely.
The net is a boundary, not a wall
The net is the most misunderstood object on the court. It looks like a barrier, but it works as a boundary, and the difference matters far beyond sport. A wall ends a relationship. A boundary makes one possible. The net is precisely what allows two people to play together without collapsing into chaos. It defines the space, holds the structure, and gives the contest its shape.
I have watched people spend years confusing the two. They build walls where boundaries would serve them, cutting others off entirely because nobody ever taught them that you can stay in contact with someone and still hold a line. Badminton makes the lesson physical. You play across the net, not through it. The boundary is what keeps the game honest, and the same is true of every relationship worth keeping.
Returning to ready position
After every point, won or lost, you come back to the same place. Feet balanced, racket up, weight forward. The game calls it the ready position. The body resets to neutral before the next exchange, regardless of what just happened.
This is, quietly, one of the most therapeutic habits I know. Much of emotional regulation is simply the capacity to return to baseline after activation, to let the nervous system settle rather than carrying the last point into the next one. The Bhagavad Gita names something close to this as samatva, an evenness of mind that holds steady through gain and loss. It pairs naturally with the idea of giving the shot everything and then releasing the result. On the court, the player who broods over a lost point usually loses the next one too. Off the court, the principle is the same and the stakes are far higher.
From love all to contempt
Here is the question the game keeps returning me to. If every match begins at love all, why does it so often end in resentment, in slammed rackets and sour handshakes, in the quiet conviction that the other person is not merely an opponent but somehow lesser?
The honest answer is that scorekeeping changes us. The moment we begin counting, the level footing of love all gives way to comparison, and comparison is fertile ground for contempt. The relationship researcher John Gottman spent decades studying couples and found that of all the corrosive behaviours, contempt was the single strongest predictor of a relationship ending. Contempt is not anger. Anger says you have wronged me. Contempt says you are beneath me. It is the slow collapse of the equality we all started with.
You can see it everywhere now, in our politics, our timelines, our family groups. We begin most encounters at something like love all, a basic assumption of shared humanity, and then the scoreboard appears. Who is right, who is winning, who matters less. The shuttle stops being a game and becomes a verdict.
What I carry off the court
I do not think badminton makes anyone a better person. Sport is rarely that tidy. But the structure of the game offers a rehearsal for things we struggle to do elsewhere. It asks me to begin as an equal, to treat my opponent as the source of my growth, to respect the boundary between us, to reset after every loss, and to walk to the net at the end and offer my hand whatever the result.
If there is one practice worth taking from all of this, it is small. Before the difficult conversation, the tense meeting, the argument you can already feel forming, try beginning where the game begins. Love all. Nobody has scored yet. You owe each other nothing but a fair contest and the assumption of equal worth. Hold that for as long as you can, and notice how much harder it becomes to truly hate the person standing across the net.
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee 
Krishna Athal at Olympic Games 2010 in Singapore representing Mauritius and the continent of Africa selected by the International Olympic Committee
