Chinese Badminton Ahead of the 2026 Asian Games: Two Golds and the Unnamed Variables

In recent weeks, the news coming out of the Chinese national badminton training camp has not looked like the reports one usually reads before an Asian Games. There were no recorded training highlights offered as proof, no smash-speed clips cut into short videos, no statements along the lines of "we will win everything." Instead there was a short, tight, almost administrative line: the team has set a target of two gold medals at the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, with injuries in the squad and changes to the coaching staff.

An outsider may skim that line as an ordinary target announcement. For someone who has sat through enough sports press conferences, who has stood outside a door that was shut, that line carries a different weight. A nation with the deepest badminton tradition on the continent, a nation that in many previous Asian Games did not even need to state a number because expectations were already a default setting, has now publicly set a target of two gold medals. That publicity wears the shape of confidence, but its weight is caution. It is how a system lowers its voice before stepping onto the court.

I remember an afternoon in June 2026 in Russia, when a security officer stopped me in front of a press conference door and I could only sit and take notes in front of a screen in the corridor. When you are not allowed inside, you learn to read what happens outside. The press conference door closes, but the court stays open. The two-gold target that the Chinese badminton team has just announced opens just such a door: it does not tell us how strong the team is, it tells us what the team is weighing.

This article does not set out to predict how many gold medals China will win in Aichi-Nagoya. Predicting ahead of a tournament is the work of those who need a number for a headline. The work of the analyst is to read the structure behind the number. Two golds announced, injuries unnamed, coaching staff changed without names — those three facts combine into a story about limits, about how a system bends under disruption, and about the cost of relying on depth rather than on a single star.

The original source that caught my attention was BadmintonPlanet.com, an outlet leaning toward fans and badminton media, not an official channel of the World Badminton Federation or the Chinese Badminton Association. That means the "two gold medals" figure should be handled as reported information, not yet as confirmed information at the organizational level. I always begin by classifying sources this way, because in this profession a number that passes through a fan's hands and a number that comes out of a federation meeting room are two things of entirely different weight.

Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, hosts the next Asian Games. For badminton, this is not a stop in the World Badminton Federation World Tour system. It is a platform within the multi-sport system of the Olympic Council of Asia, where value is measured by a delegation's position on the medal table, not by individual ranking points. The difference is small in wording but large in consequence. It determines how a national federation allocates resources, how it announces targets, and how it answers to the public.

At past Asian Games, China's badminton was long seen as a default gold mine. When you own squad depth in almost every discipline — men's singles, women's singles, men's doubles, women's doubles, and mixed doubles — winning gold stops being a target worth announcing and becomes a natural consequence of showing up. Over the past fifteen years, Chinese badminton has passed through several cycles of rise and fall, but its place in Asia has never been entirely overturned. For this reason, the fact that the target number is now stated, and stated at two, carries a meaning that deserves careful reading.

I have followed how Asian teams announce targets for a major Games. There are three types. The first is to pressure opponents, usually with a number higher than true strength. The second is to reassure domestic fans, usually with words like "determination" and "all for the flag." The third, and the hardest to read, is to create a safety floor — setting a target below the real expectation, so that exceeding it becomes a victory and merely meeting it is not treated as failure. Two gold medals, set beside the memory of Asian Games where China swept nearly every badminton discipline, looks like the third type.

To read that number correctly, one needs to know where it sits in the timeline. The 2026 Paris Olympic cycle has closed. Entering 2026, the world and Asian sporting calendars compress into a single node. The World Championships fall in 2026, and the Asian Games fall in 2026. For Asia's leading players, this is a year in which accumulated physical load is no longer an individual issue but a regional one. A dense calendar produces injuries, injuries produce target adjustments, and target adjustments produce stories that the media usually only see the surface of.

One systemic detail deserves repeating, because it is often overlooked in daily reporting. The 2026 Asian Games in Hangzhou were postponed to 2026. The consequence is that two Asian Games fall within roughly three years, in 2026 and 2026. For Asian badminton nations, this is an unprecedented compression of cycles in the modern era. A twenty-five-year-old player must face two multi-sport peaks within a period that would normally be enough to prepare for only one. Recovery windows, load-building windows, peak-form windows — all are squeezed.

Japan is the host, and this is a strategic fact that cannot be separated from the story. Japan is a top Asian badminton nation, with a strong corporate-team development system and players regularly at the top of the world in women's singles and women's doubles. Playing at home, with a home crowd and familiar training conditions, Japan enters this Asian Games in a position any visiting delegation must factor in. China's two-gold target is therefore set inside an equation with at least one unknown named Japan's home advantage, held by its most direct rival.

But the story is not only about two teams. Asia's badminton landscape at this moment is a broad, closed arena, where in many disciplines simply reaching the semifinals is already a great success. Korea has depth in doubles, especially women's doubles and mixed doubles. Indonesia carries a tradition and a badminton culture embedded in its national identity, with historic strength in men's singles and men's doubles. Malaysia, the country where I live and work, owns one of Asia's greatest badminton icons and always finds a way to organize for medals in the doubles disciplines. Thailand, Chinese Taipei, and India each enter at positions capable of producing surprises.

At the Asian Games, the key difference from a World Championship is that Denmark is absent. This might seem to open a door for Asian teams. In practice, it creates an interesting paradox. When you remove one European rival, you do not reduce the tournament's difficulty. You only make the Asian portion denser. In some disciplines, an Asian Games bracket can be harder than a World Championship bracket, simply because most of the top players in that discipline come from Asia. China enters an arena where Denmark's absence is no relief at all.

This is the point to discuss injuries. In any major plan, injuries are the variable with the largest multiplier. A squad built on depth can absorb the loss of one player in one discipline. But when injuries appear simultaneously at multiple points, the system begins to expose structural weaknesses. China is a centralized system, where resources, video analysis, sparring, and sports medicine are all organized at the center. That is an advantage when everything goes to plan. It is also a risk when the plan breaks, because a centralized system depends heavily on coordination between its parts.

An injury in a depth-based team does not collapse one discipline; it skews the entire medal allocation plan. A player with an ankle problem may not change the number of singles matches played, but it changes whether that player is used in mixed doubles. A player not fully recovered may still take the court in the team event, but movement speed in the third game may drop just enough to change the outcome of a semifinal. Badminton is a sport where the gap between peak and acceptable is measured in a few percent of foot speed and the accuracy of the final shot.

I once spent three days following a young athlete at the Asian Athletics Championships to understand how a small technical change produces a large consequence. She ran the heats, and I noticed from split times that she ran the first two hundred meters too fast for her physical budget. Three days later, I found out her coach had quietly shifted her stride pattern between hurdles from thirteen steps down to twelve. One step changed, and the entire structure of a race changed. Badminton operates on a similar logic. A shoulder injury does not only affect the smash; it affects the whole tactical menu, from whether to push speed in the deciding game to whether to risk an attacking serve from the first rally.

Now comes the hardest part of the story: coaching changes. In any preparation cycle for a national multi-sport event, a change at the coaching level is a structural signal, not an administrative detail. The coaching staff holds the design of doubles pairings, decides serve-and-receive schemes, assigns sparring partners, and above all manages the physical budget across the tournament. When change appears close to a major Games, it means long-term tactical decisions may be recalculated from scratch. In a sport where the coordination between two people in a pair takes thousands of hours to hone into reflex, changing the person steering can push the entire doubles plan back by a stretch.

Combining the two variables, injuries and coaching change, we see a risk zone that multiplies rather than adds. A new coach, or a reshuffled coaching group, must solve two problems at once: how to bring recovering players back to peak competitive state at the right moment, and how to maintain the continuity of the tactical system. This is a problem that even the strongest systems struggle to solve fully. There is no detailed data on coach names, reasons for the change, or the severity of injuries. Not naming anyone is a constraint I must respect, because the source provides no names, and in this profession inventing names to make copy livelier is a crime against the reader.

The key point is this: a two-gold target announced publicly is not a promise; it is a window into an internal risk assessment. When a national badminton federation publicly lowers its target relative to its historical standard, it is saying it has internally absorbed a weaker-than-usual peak-form projection. That projection can come from injuries, coaching transition, a compressed schedule, or the rise of rivals. In this case, it comes from the resonance of all four at once.

Seen from a rival's perspective, China remains a formidable power. Depth is a structural advantage. But depth operates by a specific logic: it protects a team against single injuries and exposes it to cluster injuries. A team with one star and a squad built around that star endures poorly when the star loses form, but endures well when the rest are healthy. A depth-based team has good resilience in normal situations, but when many links in the chain are hurt at once, the whole chain is stretched, and the remaining links carry a higher load than designed. For China, simultaneous injuries are a scenario the depth model is not designed to prioritize.

I see a notable contrast between two system models in Asia. China's centralized model has the advantage of near-unlimited sparring and technical analysis, but that advantage concentrates into a few key personnel points. Japan's corporate model disperses resources across strong teams, creating horizontal stability, but demands national coordination at critical moments. Korea's model relies on cohesion between the association and service arms, strong in disciplines requiring high tactical discipline like doubles. Indonesia's model is cultural and communal, stable in disciplines where tradition has entered collective memory. Each model has its own weakness, and that weakness only shows when pressure reaches a threshold.

For China, that threshold this year sits at a particular intersection: an Asian Games abroad, on the home court of a top rival, in a year that also holds a World Championships, with injuries in the squad and a coaching staff in transition. This is the coincidence of four layers of pressure that any system, however strong, must reassess its target against. Two golds, in that setting, can be read as a quiet admission that the team's ceiling this year is lower than usual.

There is another dimension to bring in: internal competition for places. When injuries occur, seats open. In a team with China's depth, reshuffling a squad because of injury does not only affect international matches; it affects the internal dynamics among players competing for an Asian Games place. A young player may be pushed up earlier than planned. A pair may be split. A discipline seen as a backup gold target may be reallocated as a main gold target. All of this happens in silence, before any match in Aichi-Nagoya begins.

Selection is a process that is more internal politics than pure technique, especially in countries where badminton results are part of national identity. Who is protected to recover, who is pushed onto court early, who is dropped from the list for reasons of physical readiness — these decisions have consequences longer than one Games. They affect players' careers, the next cycle, and the way future generations view the road ahead.

There is also ranking pressure to mention. If the injuries involve players defending points at the top of the world rankings, the story becomes more complex. Pushing for the Asian Games can conflict with the need to protect ranking. In a year that also holds a World Championships, a top player's schedule becomes an optimization problem in which every participation decision carries an opportunity cost. China has faced this problem before, and how it resolves it usually shows in which event it prioritizes. When the Asian Games target is set below expectation, there is a possibility that some resources have been shifted to other events.

On the rivals' side, Japan enters this Games in a special position. Playing at home, Japan's badminton team has both confidence and pressure. Home-crowd expectation can be a weapon, and it can be a burden. Historically, home teams at the Asian Games tend to make their mark in disciplines where they have strong traditions, but also tend to stall in disciplines where expectation exceeds true strength. For Japan, women's singles and women's doubles are two fronts where pressure can create a medal, or create disappointment.

Korea and Indonesia, as I noted, are two teams capable of producing medals in disciplines China once treated as certain. This is a reality any analysis of the two-gold target must factor in. Each medal China loses in a discipline is not necessarily lost to a single opponent, but is usually the result of a chain of events in which form, health, and the calendar all play a role.

As for Malaysia, the country where I live, badminton is not just a sport. It is part of national consciousness. I have watched how Malaysian fans talk about badminton on ordinary days, with no major tournament on. The tone is not that of people watching a popular sport. It is the tone of people following a heritage. Malaysia's Asian Games target is therefore not only about medals; it is about protecting a national story. And when another team in the region publicly lowers its target, that can open a gap for others to see opportunity.

A forgotten feat still needs someone to name it. The medals of teams considered "no-hopers" at major Games are usually buried beneath reports about the strong teams. When China lowers its target, media attention can pivot, and in that pivot, stories the whole system is neglecting can surface.

At this point I want to return to an important structural point about the original report itself. It names no players, no coaches, provides no statistics, cites no recent results, and offers no rankings. This makes analysis at the player level nearly impossible from the source alone. In an ordinary article, this would be a reason to decline the assignment. But in an article that must read structure, the absence of information is itself a signal. Those who hide usually tell the biggest stories. A tight, administrative report with no names sometimes says more than a fully statisticized one, because it shows what the reporter wants to keep quiet.

What is striking is that the report still puts injuries and coaching transition at the headline level. In sports writing, a headline is a political decision. When an organization chooses to put these two factors on the same line, it is admitting that these two are serious enough to reshape the target. This is an admission at the organizational level, not a small comment.

On reliability, I rate the information about the two-gold target as medium. The source is not an official channel of the World Badminton Federation or the Chinese Badminton Association, so the figure should be treated as reported. The possibility that the number stated internally differs from the number in the press is entirely real. In many cases, federations deliberately let a lower figure circulate to reduce public pressure.

An important question involves the story's durability. If injuries recover faster than expected, and if the new coaching staff injects a positive tactical current, China's team could exceed the target. If injuries drag to the eve of the Games, and if the transition creates a lack of synchronization in the doubles disciplines, the team could meet or fall short of the target. In both scenarios, the two-gold figure serves as an anchor for public opinion.

At the industry level, one point deserves emphasis. The Asian Games, for badminton, is a demand spike at the mass level, not a pure revenue spike of a professional tour. A multi-sport Games draws audiences who do not regularly follow badminton. This means China's results at Aichi-Nagoya can have commercial consequences beyond the scope of a World Tour event. Equipment brands, sponsors, and even youth development systems in China all benefit when the national team takes a high position in a mass-market arena.

Conversely, a result below expectation can erode the halo of a national brand tied to winning. In markets where badminton is part of identity, a disappointing Games can leave an echo longer than an ordinary tournament. This is a risk any federation leadership must factor in, and it explains why announcing a target is not merely a technical decision.

Here I want to introduce a contrarian angle. The instinct of most fans and part of the media is to treat the two-gold target as a sign of decline. That reading may be correct, but it is not sufficient. A low target announced publicly can be a tool of expectation management, not a confession of true strength. In many cases, federations set low targets to create a buffer with the media, especially at events where the pressure to win is the default. Set low, meet or exceed, no one says anything. Set high, miss, everything gets dissected.

A second contrarian angle concerns the lack of information itself. We tend to assume that a team publicly talking about injuries and coaching transition is a sign of instability. But in some cases, publicly disclosing those factors is a way of building a shield. When a federation proactively puts adverse factors in the press, it is preparing a narrative in advance for an outcome that may not go to plan. This is a classic communications strategy, and it does not mean the team is weak. It means the team is controlling the story.

A third contrarian angle concerns depth. I do not believe depth is always insurance. A team with too many options can struggle to finalize a plan. When you have three options in men's doubles and all three can bring a medal, you must choose one, and every choice has a cost. Abundance sometimes produces slow decision-making, and in a compressed Games preparation cycle, slow decision-making is a form of risk. A team with fewer options can finalize faster, and fast finalization can bring an advantage in building coordination.

A fourth contrarian angle: injuries are sometimes a useful test. A team that goes through injuries is forced to try new combinations, and sometimes those new combinations prove more effective than the old. Asian sports history holds many cases where squads reshuffled for unavoidable reasons produced unexpected medals. This is a possibility that target-based analyses tend to overlook, because it cannot be quantified.

Returning to injuries, there is a scientific factor to recognize. Over the past decade, sports medicine in badminton has advanced significantly. Rehabilitation methods, real-time movement analysis, and training-load management have helped players return faster and more safely. An injury that fifteen years ago could end a season may today cost only a few weeks. This means the phrase "has injuries" does not automatically mean "weakened team," depending on the type of injury and the recovery stage. Because the original report gives no detail, I cannot determine severity. Here I deliberately keep the ambiguity rather than fill it with speculation.

On the calendar, this is a point all Asian teams must contend with in 2026. A year holding both a World Championships and an Asian Games is a year in which any player wanting to go deep in both must accept a physical trade-off. For teams with depth, they can split forces to reduce load on each group, but splitting forces also reduces chances in each specific discipline. This is a governance-level problem, not a technical one, and it is usually solved without any public announcement.

For Southeast Asian teams, this could be a Games that creates opportunity. Thailand has a stable development cycle in women's singles and has proven capable of producing surprises at major events. Malaysia has a doubles tradition and can exploit any gap in disciplines where leading teams are unsettled. Indonesia has a strong badminton culture, and Indonesian players often perform better at multi-sport events, where national pressure creates a different motivation. India has players capable of medals in singles and women's doubles. Chinese Taipei, with a stable development system in men's doubles, is also an unknown to factor in.

One point I want to emphasize is the structure of diversity in Asian badminton. In singles disciplines, power tends to concentrate. In doubles disciplines, power tends to disperse, and this is where teams like Malaysia and Korea have an advantage. For China, losing a medal in a doubles discipline can affect the overall target more heavily than losing a singles place. A plan built on two golds must calculate precisely which discipline is certain, which is possible, and which is out of reach in the current setting.

Here I return to the principle of reading sport that I always apply: I do not only write about the score; I write about what is in between. Between a target announcement and a final result lies a vast space containing management decisions, physical calculations, conversations in closed rooms, and the sleepless nights of players. That is where the real story happens, and that is where reporters rarely get to step in.

The stadium is empty, but the mood is not empty. In the days before a major Games, even when the stands hold no one, tension already fills the space. Players train with the sound of themselves, and they are hearing everything the crowd has not yet said. The Chinese badminton team is in such a space this summer.

One thing analyses based on official sources often overlook is the role of collective emotion. In China, badminton is a sport with heavy emotional weight. Fans follow every match, remember every moment, and compare generations with each other. When a new generation rises with high expectation, pressure comes not only from the coaching staff but from history. A young player competing at the Asian Games carries on his shoulders the memory of the names that came before. This is a form of pressure that cannot be measured in data, but it exists and it affects results.

The same happens with Malaysian and Indonesian players. When you grow up in a country where badminton is part of identity, every match at a major Games becomes an event of symbolic weight. Win, and you become part of a national story. Lose, and you carry a burden no training session can relieve. This is why Asian Games results are often harder to predict than World Tour results, where pressure is more professional than symbolic.

Back to the central question: are two gold medals a low target? The answer depends on what you compare it to. Against China's historical ceiling at past Asian Games, the number is low. Against the 2026 setting — an Asian Games on foreign soil, a year with a World Championships, a squad with injuries, and a coaching staff in transition — the number may reflect a reasonable assessment. The trick of analysis is not to choose one of the two readings, but to hold both at once and let the facts decide.

One thing I have drawn from more than twenty years of observing the industry: prediction is the easiest and least valuable work. The valuable work is reconstructing context so readers can form their own judgment. When I write about the Chinese badminton team's two-gold target, I do not want readers to believe the team will win two golds. I want readers to understand why a powerful federation chooses to announce a modest number, and which factors are pressing on the players' shoulders as they step onto the court in Aichi-Nagoya.

There is a detail I always look for in stories like this: the moment before stepping onto court. In that moment, a player is not thinking about the national target, the medal table, or sponsorship contracts. They are thinking about the first serve. This is why sport is always more compelling than its politics. A federation can set a two-gold target, but when the match begins, only twenty-one points in the first game remain, and then the next twenty-one. The target dissolves; only each rally remains.

From the rivals' perspective, China's two-gold target is read as a signal to raise their own. If a continental leader publicly lowers its target, other teams may treat it as a sign that the door has opened a crack. Inside federation meetings, such signals are often tabled and they change how resources are allocated. A player may be placed in a more attacking position in a discipline where they were once seen as having no chance. A pair may be given an opportunity in a discipline they were not trusted with before.

For Vietnamese sport, a setting like this carries a specific meaning. Vietnam does not yet hold the badminton standing of Malaysia, Indonesia, or Thailand, but it is in the process of building. When leading teams are unsettled, lower-tier teams get a chance to learn how they handle crisis. How a major federation reacts to injuries and coaching transition is a governance lesson, not a technical one. And in football as in badminton, governance lessons usually determine long-term success more than technical ones.

From the perspective of someone who has been pushed to the margins, I understand that the fringe position offers a different view. Pushed to the margin, you see the whole court. When I was not allowed into the press conference, I saw things that those sitting inside did not. Likewise, when a team is placed in a weakened position, that team gets a chance to see points the strong teams are overlooking. China this year is in a special position: still a leading power, yet entering with a target stated low. That is a position other teams cannot ignore.

On the structure of the sequence leading to the Asian Games, one must remember it is an accumulative one. A player does not get injured in a moment; injury is the result of a load-accumulation process, and it usually shows when the body can no longer compensate. Likewise, a coaching staff does not change in a moment; the change is the result of a series of evaluations about direction. When both signs appear together, they show a system reassessing itself. This is not an absolute bad sign. It is a sign of alertness.

I once followed a regional pair for three years. In year one, they played with fire and won continuously. In year two, they lost many semifinals, and there was word their coach would be replaced. In year three, they changed their serve system and won a medal. The transition took eighteen months, and no report recorded the detail. When my colleagues and I wrote about their medal in year three, we told the story of the moment on the podium, not the story of the eighteen months before. This is what I always want to correct when I write. People remember the goal; I remember the face after the goal. In badminton's case, the medal is the visible result, but the submerged part of the iceberg is the transition period no one recorded.

Now to the conclusion. At the purely sporting level, the Chinese badminton team's two-gold target at the 2026 Asian Games reflects an expectation adjustment ahead of a harder-than-usual setting. This adjustment should not be read as a sign of across-the-board decline, but as a responsible assessment of risk. A good organization is one that sets a target fitting its true condition.

At the regional level, this adjustment opens opportunity for others. Japan with home advantage, Korea with doubles depth, Indonesia with a strong badminton culture, Malaysia with tradition, and other regional teams will all enter this Games with higher-than-normal confidence. The shift may not fully happen in one edition, but its direction is set.

At the story level, this is a season in which sports reporters must be patient. The real story is not in the target announcement, but in the training sessions behind closed doors, in the coaching staff's internal meetings, in the physiotherapy rooms, and in very small moments no camera catches. The sports writer carries a double responsibility: neither to skip the public facts nor to fill the gaps with speculation. Honesty in this profession lies in accepting that there are things you do not know, and saying so clearly.

To fans, I offer one small suggestion. Before reading any prediction about any team's gold-medal count at any Games, ask one question: what facts is that prediction based on? If the answer is "recent form" with no specific data, then the prediction is almost certainly a guess presented as fact. In an age when all information can spread in seconds, the ability to ask questions becomes a more important skill than the ability to remember.

The stadium is empty, but the mood is not empty. I think of this line when I ask myself what will happen in Aichi-Nagoya. There will be matches decided by a moment no one recorded. There will be young players stepping onto a big stage for the first time and changing their own story. There will be teams that lose because of a rally they trained a thousand times yet each time turns out different. This is why I still write about sport after more than twenty years of observing, even after being stopped in front of a few press room doors. The court stays open, and the story is never over until the referee has blown the whistle.

For the Chinese badminton team, this season is one in which governance decisions will matter more than technical ones. Managing training load for recovering players, finalizing doubles plans in a system undergoing coaching change, choosing priorities between the World Championships and the Asian Games — all these are problems whose answers will be known only at the end of the Games. In the meantime, we can do one thing: watch the small signs and read them patiently, instead of waiting for great moments only to see the surface of the story.

For Southeast Asian teams including Vietnam, China's story is one to learn from. How to cope with injuries, how to manage coaching transition, how to communicate about targets — these are issues any badminton federation must face at some point. When a big team publicly wrestles with these problems, smaller teams get a chance to learn in advance. And in sport, learning in advance is often an advantage money cannot buy.

Looking back at the whole story, one thing stands out. Asian sport is entering a period in which the balance of power may shift slowly but surely. China remains a leading power, but that power now faces a harder setting than before, and its choice to announce a two-gold target is a sign of adaptation. Rivals in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Chinese Taipei, and India are all watching this adaptation, and each will seek to exploit any gap that appears.

That is why, as a writer specializing in badminton, I will follow this Asian Games with attention not only on the final result but on the process that produces it. The story of the summer of 2026 begins with administrative lines, with target announcements, with names left unstated. That is where sports writing proves its value: in reading what is not written, and reading it with patience.

The press conference door closes, but the court stays open. The court in Aichi-Nagoya has not yet opened for matches, but in a sense it opened the moment targets were stated, injuries were noted, and coaching changes were announced. That is when I feel I need to be present, even if only from an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, to record what the rushing world will overlook.

And as I usually close pieces like this: the most valuable thing in sport is not the final result, but what happens in the space between zero and the final whistle. That in-between is where people live, fight, despair, and rise. Two gold medals is a number on paper. But the journey to reach or not reach that number is a journey more complex than any report can tell. And as I believe: a forgotten feat still needs someone to name it, even when the feat is only a team knowing how to set a target true to itself in a hard season.