LONDON — Abby Wambach, the veteran forward on the United States women’s soccer team, said the other day that “no one gives you anything for finishing at the top of your group.” And the goal of every Olympic athlete, from Wambach to Usain Bolt to Ann Romney’s horse Rafalca, is to win a medal. The rest is just a journey.

So why the uproar over the tactics used by the four women’s badminton teams that were disqualified for trying to lose their final preliminary-round matches? Where exactly did the badminton players veer off into corruption?

They did not organize the tournament. They did not arrange the draw.

They simply looked at the information that was presented to them, looked at their ultimate goal and went in the direction that seemed to have the best chance of leading them there. A loss in those matches, they decided, would give them a better path to winning a medal. How is this different from, say, a swimmer who coasts to the wall in a preliminary heat or a runner who jogs past the finish line in a semifinal to conserve energy for the final? Is it even that much different from a baseball player bunting?

Derek Jeter is a career .313 hitter. And yet in certain situations, sometimes even important situations in important games, Jeter goes up to the plate with the intention of not getting a hit. If he is successful — that is, if he succeeds at failing — he will be congratulated by his teammates when he returns to the dugout. The rules of baseball and other sports create situations in which a type of failure can be good strategy.