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This was a tough one. We located a number of useful badminton sites, but nothing really definitive about the relative importance of the various tournaments. Here's what we found: A Yahoo! search on "badminton" led us straight to the Recreation > Sports > Badminton category. There we found a nice site, Badminton Central, which offered the following tidbit: "Aside form the Olympics there are the Thomas and Uber cups (men's and women's world team championships respectively) held every even year, World championships and Sudirman cup (world mixed team championships, held every odd year), Pan American games, US open and a number of Grand Prix tournaments
around the world." We continued our search by returning to Yahoo!'s Badminton category and drilling down to the Organizations sub-category. The most promising entry, The International Badminton Federation, confirmed the infomrmation from Badminton Central. From their Badminton History page: "The first major IBF tournament was the Thomas Cup (world men's team championships) in 1948. Since then, the number of world events has increased with the addition of the Uber Cup (ladies' team), World Championships, Sudirman Cup (mixed team), World Juniors and the World Grand Prix Finals." They go on to say that
the World Cup, originally begun to "provide top players with an opportunity to earn greater levels of prize money," was discontinued in 1996 since the Grand Prix circuit had matured and prize money had generally increased. Finally, we did some searches on "Uber cup" and "Thomas cup" to see if we could track down more information. Our best find, Smash, offers historical data on all the tournaments previously mentioned, but no real clue as to which one is considered the "Super Bowl" or "World Series" of badminton. It looks like you'll have to decide for yourself....
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