After dealing with a combined run of ends in 2024, Indian shuttlers will gear up for the New 12 months with enthusiasm because the season started with the Malaysia Open and India Open however the primary focus will likely be on probably the most prestigious All England Open Badminton Championship and World Championship together with different massive occasions. Indian shuttlers have gained a complete of 5 titles within the 2024 BWF World Tour. Of the 5 titles,one every are in males’s and ladies’s singles, two in males’s doubles, and one in ladies’s doubles.
The brand new season will start with Asian swing because the Tremendous 1000 match, Malaysia Open, begins on January 7 in Kuala Lumpur, adopted by the Indian Open, which is a Tremendous 750 occasion, scheduled from January 14-19 within the nation’s capital.
Indonesia Grasp Tremendous 500 (January 21 to 26) and Thailand Masters Tremendous 300 (January 28 to February 2) will sum up the Asian circuit earlier than the motion shifts to Europe.
The European leg will start with none aside from the All England Open, the world’s oldest and most prestigious badminton match, operating from March 11 to 16 on the Utilita Enviornment in Birmingham.
Indian shuttlers have been collaborating within the All England Open for a very long time, however have solely gained two titles to date with 5 last appearances between 1980 and 2024.
Badminton legend Prakash Padukone is the one Indian to have reached the All England Open last twice, first in 1980, when he created historical past by turning into the primary Indian to win the celebrated title. The next yr, he made his second last on the match however could not handle to defend his males’s singles title. After a protracted wait of 21 years, Pulle Gopichand turned the second Indian to win the All England Open in 2001.
London Olympics bronze medallist Saina Nehwal then turned the primary Indian girl to achieve the All England summit conflict in 2015 and ended up as runner’s up earlier than Lakshya Sen, turned the primary Indian male shuttler to make the lads’s last in 21 years since Gopichand.
Star shuttlers, together with PV Sindhu, who just lately tied the knot, Lakshya Sen, the dynamic males’s doubles pair Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, and the promising ladies’s doubles duo Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand, who reached back-to-back semifinals in 2022 and 2023, will likely be striving to clinch the elusive title and finish a 45-year wait.
Former champions Satwik and Chirag will likely be aiming to retain the lads’s doubles title on the Badminton Asia Championship, scheduled from April 8 to 13 in Ningbo, China, after lacking out on the match in 2024. The star duo was the primary Indian pair to win the gold medal on the continental occasion in 2023.
Satwik and Chirag, who turned the primary Indian males’s doubles pair to achieve the summit of the BWF rankings in 2023, did not have a blast in 2024, as they gained only one title, the French Open, their second triumph on the match, after having misplaced two finals on the Malaysia Masters and the India Open.
Nonetheless, that they had a robust begin to their Paris Olympic marketing campaign and made it to the quarterfinal however failed to maneuver previous the last-eighth stage.
Elsewhere, within the combined staff occasion the shuttlers will likely be making an attempt to vary the color of the bronze medal they gained in 2023 on the Badminton Asia Combined Staff Championships, set to happen from February 11-16 in Qingdao, China.
The BWF World Championships is ready to be held from August 25 to 31 in Paris, France. India have gained 14 medals on the championships from 1983 to 2023.
Sindhu is probably the most profitable Indian shuttler at BWF World Championships with 5 medals. She is simply the second girl on the planet after China’s Zhang Ning to ever win 5 or extra singles medals within the competitors.
Double Olympic medallist Sindhu confronted a difficult part after her gold medal win in ladies’s singles on the 2022 Commonwealth Video games. Struggling to regain her type following an damage layoff, she encountered a sequence of early exits that noticed her drop out of the highest 10 world rankings in March 2023-a place she had maintained since November 2016. Including to her woes, Sindhu missed the possibility to safe a 3rd Olympic medal after being eradicated within the pre-quarterfinals of the Paris Olympics.
However in the beginning of December, Sindhu bagged her first title after greater than two years as she defeated China’s Wu Luo Yu within the Syed Modi Worldwide ladies’s singles summit conflict.
The previous world champion final gained a title on the Singapore Open in July 2022. Within the ongoing 2024 season, she solely featured within the Malaysia Masters Tremendous 500 last earlier than ending her title drought in Lucknow.
Kidambi Srikanth (Silver 2021), Lakshya (Bronze 2021), Satwik-Chirag (Bronze 2022), and HS Prannoy (Bronze 2023) are the lively gamers in addition to Sindhu with World Championships medals.
Notably, since 2017, India have gained a minimum of one medal in each version of the BWF World Championships.
With a number of high Indian shuttlers aiming for main titles in 2025, together with the celebrated All England Open and the BWF World Championships, the yr guarantees to be pivotal for Indian badminton.
The gamers, fuelled by previous successes and ongoing challenges, will look to additional elevate India’s standing in world badminton.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)
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