Badminton serves Kevin Cordon’s mission

Trying to become a Guatemalan futbol star, say, the next Carlos Ruiz (the former Galaxy striker), would have been the understandable path for a certain youngster bursting with athletic talent.

What, then, if the Olympic Games happened to be the ultimate destination?

The way Kevin Cordon looked at it: One made a lot more sense than 11. To reach the Olympics, playing soccer, he would need help and a lot of it. Ten other players, in addition to himself, of course.

There was another sport to potentially get him to the vaunted Olympic stage, having to rely solely on the man in the mirror. He picked badminton, a curious selection considering the pecking order of the sport in his native Guatemala.

“Why badminton? That’s a good question,” Cordon said. “One of my dreams was to qualify for the Olympics. So I couldn’t do it if I played futbol because with futbol, it is very difficult. With the team, it’s not easy. Badminton, I thought, was not [as] difficult. I’d have more chances to qualify.”

There wasn’t anyone in his family with stray Yonex rackets sprawled around the house to pave the way.

“No one. Nobody,” he said. “I live very far from Guatemala City, five hours by car. That’s interesting because as I tell you before, nobody [really] played.”

Cordon was talking after his third-round singles match this week at the Yonex/OCBC U.S. Open Grand Prix event at the Orange County Badminton Club in Orange. He took his first two matches in straight sets and defeated Dieter Domke of Germany in three sets. In Thursday night’s quarterfinals, Cordon was to face Hsuan Yi Hsueh of Taiwan.

The tournament is one of a series of qualifiers for the 2012 London Olympics, but Cordon said he’d already qualified for that event. He qualified for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and was the flag carrier at the opening ceremony for his country’s 12-member contingent.

“It was one of the best experiences of my life,” he said.

The 24-year-old has had to take his talent far away from Guatemala to improve. Cordon had been at the national training center in Madrid since March and will be based there until October, leaving shortly before the Pan American Games in Mexico.

This has led to his educating a lot of his badminton colleagues about his native country.

“That’s the first question they ask me: Where Guatemala is? I just say it is next to Mexico or something like that,” Cordon said. “That’s really good because now people know where Guatemala is.”

There weren’t exactly a lot of national predecessors on the badminton circuit, to be sure.

Kenneth Erichsen played in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics for Guatemala, and Pedro Yang represented Guatemala in Athens in 2004. Yang happens to be a member of the IOC Athletes Commission and is still active in badminton, losing in the first round of singles and doubles at the U.S. Open in Orange.

The U.S. Open is something of a sneak preview for the Olympics with about 350 of sport’s elite on hand for this event running through Sunday. The skill, finesse and power, all in a confined space, are fairly overwhelming and that helped attract Cordon to the sport.

“Badminton looks easy,” Cordon said. “The sport looks easy. You have to have power, instruction, good technique. You have to be smart. It’s not, for example, just running and running.”

lisa.dillman@latimes.com

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