If there was one trend that became clear at the just-concluded World Badminton Championship, it was the fact that China is not the force it once was
Japan's Nozomi Okuhara poses with her gold medal in Glasgow on Sunday. Pic/AFP
If there was one trend that became clear at the just-concluded World Badminton Championships, it was the fact that China is not the force it once was.
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The Chinese left Glasgow without a gold medal in the singles events, and their over-all tally was seven medals – two gold, two silver and three bronze – out of a maximum possible 20 medals in the five disciplines.
There was a big improvement in the Japanese tally of four medals – one gold, one silver and two bronze – from the three bronze medals they had won at Jakarta in the 2015 edition of the Worlds.
Indonesia ended in third place in the medals tally with a gold and a silver, and Denmark scooped a gold and a bronze, while India produced its best performance ever, with a silver and a bronze, both in the women’s singles. Other nations to have received an honourable mention on the medals table were South Korea, England and Hong Kong, with a bronze medal apiece.
The biggest upset of the tournament was notched by gangling 24 year old Dane, Viktor Axelsen, who beat two Chinese – the two-time defending champion Chen Long and the five-time former champion Lin Dan – in straight games, and in successive rounds, to leave his indelible impress upon the 2017 competition.
It was not unexpected that the essentially defensive top-seeded Korean, Son Wan Ho, failed to make the men’s singles final, but it did cause a major flutter when four-time former silver medalist from Malaysia, Lee Chong Wei, made an unceremonious exit in the opening round, well beaten by unheralded Frenchman, Brice Leverdez.
The women’s singles produced upsets galore, with the world’s top player, Tai Tzu Ying of Chinese Taipei bizarrely withdrawing from the competition so that she could participate in the World University Games, and the top three seeds getting sidelined before the medal rounds were reached.
Two-time defending champion Carolina Marin came a cropper in the quarter-finals against the eventual champion, Japan’s pocket-sized Nozomi Okuhara, who went on to beat the two Indian medalists in previous editions of the Championships, Saina Nehwal and P V Sindhu, on her way to the title.
Apart from a solid performance by the two Indians, a noteworthy showing was also scored by China’s 19 year old reigning world and Asian junior champion, Chen Yufei, who knocked out the No 1 seed from Japan, Akane Yamaguchi, and the 2013 world champion, Ratchanok Intanon of Thailand, in convincing fashion, before she came unstuck in the semi-final against a rampaging Sindhu.
Japan were dominant in the women’s doubles, with two of their four combinations grabbing medals – silver for Fukushima-Hirota and bronze for Takahashi-Matsutomo, the reigning Olympic champions, who were upset by the powerful Chinese combination of Chen Qingchen and Jia Yifan in the penultimate reckoning.
Indeed, the hugely talented Qingchen made two finals, and proved peerless in the women’s doubles, but had to remain content with a silver in the mixed event in the company of Zheng Siwei, after Olympic champions Tontowi Ahmad and Lilyana Natsir proved that they were the best in the world at the moment.
It was a toss-up in the men’s doubles as to who would win the event that saw nearly seven pairs playing at the same high level. The distinction of pocketing the gold ultimately went to the Chinese pairing of Liu Cheng and Zhang Nan, who cut down the new Indonesian combination of Mohammad Ahsan and Rian Agung Saputro in the final. Ahsan had won the 2015 event with the now-retired Hendra Setiawan.
Liu and Zhang prevented the Chinese from returning home with scant spoils, but it was apparent that a new world order was emerging in international badminton.
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