After Jenny and Greg Mairs had played their final match as professional badminton players - in the quarterfinals of the All-England Championships - an emotional Greg threw his racquet into the home crowd and it was caught by people wearing bright red T-shirts emblazoned with a logo spelling out 'Badminton Insight'. Standard farewell match behaviour... till you look closely. Badminton Insight is the Mairs' pandemic-era YouTube channel, which has grown so much in popularity since that they are retiring to become full-time badminton content creators.
When the married mixed doubles pair announced that this would be their final professional badminton tournament, it may not have meant much to a casual fan. They are not exactly a top-ranking pair and they'd never won a match at All England, badminton's oldest and most prestigious tournament, before. But here they were in the quarterfinal, knocking out two higher-ranked pairs cheered by the home crowd.
"[It was] pretty surreal, to be honest," says Jenny, who spoke to ESPN alongside Greg from their home near Manchester. "It was so special [to see subscribers in their channel's kit.] To have so many people there to watch us and support us was just amazing."
The reason for retiring makes their story unique in international sport. "We feel like we can inspire a lot more people to play badminton, to improve badminton, through the channel, rather than through playing international tournaments. So that's what has made us make that decision," says Greg.
While big success on the court may be limited, the Mairs are making moves off it, building a YouTube channel which has grown to almost 6,00,000 subscribers. As players they were traveling around the world - Malaysia, India and Indonesia in back-to-back weeks - but weren't winning that much. Not being as generously funded as some of the other elite badminton players around the world, they were essentially spending money and time on themselves. That felt quite selfish.
Now, they want to focus on their channel where they have a variety of content already - from tips for amateurs to improve their game, to vlogs of their trips around the world, to even a glimpse of what training with the world no.1s looks like.
The best part about this career transition for the Mairs, they say, is that it doesn't change much of their day-to-day lives. They're still going to be playing badminton. However, the time that goes into the YouTube channel is time saved by not doing the other things you're expected to do as a professional athletes like recovery and sleeping on time. Finally, they decided that stepping away from the professional game was their way to not feel guilty about not doing those things.
None of this is to say that they aren't satisfied with what they have achieved. In fact, Greg says they have achieved more than they ever thought they would. They were never the best juniors in Europe, let alone in the world. They made their careers by making the best use of their collective talents... which also led to the conclusion that there wasn't a whole lot more improving to do on court. Both husband and wife are 31 years now and they felt that there's only so much any improvements would amount to, unless they shifted base to another country. Even then, says Greg, there would be no guarantee of improving to the extent of consistently challenging the best pairs in the world. But as badminton content creators, the trajectory is vastly different.
"We know there's so much potential for Badminton Insight. For us, it's become obvious that this is what we want to do, and it's also going to help a lot more people. And that for us right now is a lot more rewarding than winning a few tournaments as professional players," Greg said.
It helps the Mairs that they've already had already first-hand validation for the work they do on YouTube. At the All England last week, Jenny says, they had someone tell them that they've not played badminton for 20 years and fell out of love with the game. But somehow, they stumbled across a Badminton Insight video, and they've now gotten back and have played every week for the last two years.
"Those kinds of comments and stories that we hear from people about our videos is just quite unbelievable sometimes. It makes us a bit emotional retelling those stories because of how amazing it is," she added.
When they started the channel, neither Greg nor Jenny imagined a possibility where they could be helping people get back into playing. Now, it's their chief motivation.
They now want to continue traveling the world. "We don't want to get bored sitting at home," Jenny says. "The aim is to help as many people around the world improve. Visiting different countries, different environments, is going to help us create cool videos in order to do that. It's also one of our aims as well to help grow the support around the world. So that will involve a lot of travel," Greg added.
"We've always thought how cool it would be if we played at loads of clubs, even though we've done a little bit on our channel. But when you're playing professionally, you can't go play four hours with amateurs. We've done a couple of those videos before, we love that, we've rewatched those videos a couple of times. We've experienced it, but we still love watching those back, and it's something we hope to do a lot more of in the future," Jenny says.
However, that they have left the professional game is also a point for English badminton to reflect upon itself. Of course, their decision to quit has partially come down to funding. Indeed, both Jenny and Greg have worked odd jobs before along with their badminton career. But Jenny says that English badminton lacks the drive and don't have best people possible in all the right places.
"We're England's no.1 [mixed doubles] pair and for us, that's not a good thing. We should be, at 30 in the world, England's fourth or fifth pair. That's partly down to funding, and partly down to having a real high-performance vision and environment," she adds.
They now leave pro sport, leaving English badminton authorities to reflect about where they are. For everyone else, Greg and Jenny Mairs are about to give us all a whole lot more badminton insight.