Badminton is the second most popular participation sport in the world, after football.

Badminton is the Fastest Racket Sport with a shuttle clocking speed in excess of 300km/h - the same speed of the Eurostar train.

The best shuttlecocks are made from the feathers taken from the left wing of a goose.

The Badminton World Federation (BWF) was founded in 1934 with nine members and now has over 156 member countries.

The BWF is now headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The official game of Badminton was born in a stately home in Gloucestershire, England, home of the Duke of Beaufort.

Badminton is an Olympic Sport played first in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.

More than 1.1 billion people watched the 1992 Olympic Badminton competition on television.

Some 140 million players, spread over the five continents, today practice badminton.  In Great Britain alone, there are some four million players.  In Denmark, it is the second largest sport after football.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, crowds of up to 15,000 people regularly fill the stands to cheer on the shuttle-smashing heroes.

During an average match, a shuttle is hit around 400 times by the players on court.  The players also travel about two kilometers around the court!

Peter Rasmussen (Denmark) and Sun Jun (China) hold the record for the longest match - 124 minutes!

Celebrity fans of Badminton include actor Paul Newman as well as football legend Diego Armando Maradona.  You can eve buy a Barbie doll with a racket and shuttles!

A shuttlecock ("shuttle" for short) is made of sixteen goose feathers, cork and very strong glue! It weighs around five grammes.

The two most successful badminton countries are China and Indonesia; between them, they have won 70% of all BWF events.