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Team Bruce Li become Canada’s overnight badminton sensations

neate sager

The way Alex Bruce and Michele Li handled their sudden starring role at London 2012 is something that ought to resonate with all Canadians.

The events that gave Team Bruce Li their chance in Olympic women's doubles badminton are bad for the sport's image — a punchline that will have shelf life four, eight, 12 years from now — but here at home, it's all about how they stayed with it. A 20-year-old from the University of Toronto and a 22-year-old from Western University in London, Ont., who could probably walk across their campuses without getting attention for being an athlete, hung in with one of the best teams from the sport's hotbed in Asia. If they should somehow pull off a bronze medal on Saturday against Russia, it will go down as the unlikeliest medal in recent Canadian Olympic annals.

From Bruce Arthur:

Canada lost, 21-12, 19-21, 21-13, and even that was incredible. Ranked 28th, they took a set off the fifth-ranked team in the world. There are different levels of success in this whole thing, and theirs was this: They showed up, and were not afraid. Bruce said she thought that was the best they had ever played.

"They played a tremendous match," said their coach, Ram Nayyar. "Literally, from everything I've got — from their Facebooks and their Twitters — it must have been the weight of Canada on their shoulders, and I think they did us proud. You know, a couple things go this way, that way, they would have that match. Tremendous, tremendous effort."

You can make fun of the notion that they had all of Canada on their shoulders — this wasn't the Olympic men's hockey final here — but remember, these are a 20-year-old (Li) and a 22-year-old (Bruce) who don't spend an awful lot of time on TV. (Postmedia News)

Canada, thanks to the TV coverage that showed the long rallies and the diving attempts to extend points, saw that badminton is far more than backyard leisure activity, although that doesn't mean one cannot mine the scandal for comic gold. It also showed how the Olympics can still provide a rallying point from out of nowhere. There's always room on someone's bandwagon.

From Steve Simmons:

Even all dressed in yellow, which is anything but typically Canadian, they were so very much Canadian. Fighting. Battling. Playing their best when it mattered most.

"It should be a sign for all the underdog countries, if you work hard anything can happen now," said Bruce, who put her University of Western Ontario education on hold to train for the Olympics. "Our game has really changed (this week). Our team has changed. It's so nice to have all this support. We can feel it from across the ocean. It's given us so much belief in ourselves."

Now it's down to a best of one match for the bronze medal Saturday between two countries who have never been this close to a medal before. (QMI Agency)

Team Bruce LI's run should also be a good advertisement for the type of student-athletes who come out of Ontario University Athletics. The attention easily could have been overwhelming. Then again, compared to cramming for an exam — Bruce previously studied civil engineering, not exactly basket-weaving — maybe an unexpected media scrum is cake.