Imagine LeBron James emigrating to say, Indonesia, and playing for that country’s Olympic team. Impossible, we know. But a similar scenario will actually play out in reverse in London. In 2000, Tony Gunawan won a badminton gold medal for Indonesia, a country where the sport is practically a national obsession. He says he couldn’t train for two months afterward, given all the interviews he had to do and the victory parade he had to attend. In 2002, Gunawan moved to the U.S. to study computer engineering and decided to coach a little badminton on the side. As it turned out, he was just too good to stop playing; with American partner Howard Bach, he won a world championship in 2005. He couldn’t represent the U.S. in the Olympics until he became a citizen; he passed the test last year, and now, at age 37, he and Bach are headed for London.
