Who is this Gade person?

Part of our collection of tickets from the Hungarians included highly sought after badminton tickets. In most other Olympics, this would be no big deal, but this is China, where badminton is hugely popular.

We watched some quarterfinal matches: two mens singles and two mixed doubles. Having played a little bit of badminton, I appreciated the skill of the players. Doubles is incredibly fast. Of course, I had no idea who any of the competitors were. We got into cheering though. One of our friends is Korean, so he was cheering for the Korean player. The Chinese fans behind us were annoyed and reprimanded us for cheering "Go Korea" in Chinese.

The big match of the session was one between Lin Dan and Peter Gade. It was incredibly lopsided. (And kind of annoying during the match, a woman with a very high voice kept screeching, "Lin Dan!" so others could respond, "Jia You!" The cheering was totally fine, but couldn't she have lowered it a few octaves?) After the match, the players got interviewed by the press. Gade spent a significant amount of time answering questions, and afterwards signed autographs for fans. People were pushing to get to him. We joked that it seemed like fans here just liked getting autographs, and it didn't matter from who. Who knew that Gade was the former world champion? Okay, probably all the fans who pushed for his autograph.