LONDON — At the Olympics, there have been doping scandals, bribery scandals and officiating scandals, many of them fully emerging only years after the fact.

The latest Olympic scandal — involving shuttlecocks and dumped badminton matches — was pretty much hiding in plain sight.

On Tuesday night at the London Games, some of the world’s best badminton players hit some of the sport’s worst shots. Sad serves into the net. Returns that sailed far wide.

Howls from the crowd were loud and instant, and the calls for investigation immediate.

On Wednesday, four women’s doubles teams — two from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia — were disqualified. But the circumstances were complicated by the fact that the rules of the sport seemed to give the athletes an incentive to lose.