Badminton’s Olympic qualification tournaments announced, India Open in May

Indian shuttlers will have the advantage of playing the last Tokyo Olympics qualification event on home turf as India Open has been now scheduled from May 11-16 in the 2021 calendar announced by the Badminton World Federation (BWF) on Monday.

The India Open, Super 500 event - was scheduled to be held in New Delhi last year from March 24-29. The BWF had to suspend the circuit from March 16 cancelling all Olympic qualification events after the All England Championships and the rankings were freezed.

The Olympic qualification cycle will now start with the Swiss Open from March 2-7. It will be followed by German Open from March 9-14. All together, there will be 17 tournaments carrying ranking points towards Olympics qualification. The other big tournaments will be Malaysia Open Super 750 (March 31-Apr 04) and Singapore Open Super 500 (Apr 13-18).

“It is good for us that the India Open will be the last qualifying event. Considering our present situation, the players will get little more time to be ready. Most of them have not played any tournament since the lockdown and it will start only with the Thailand Open in January,” said former international and selector Vimal Kumar.

World champion PV Sindhu, Sai Praneeth and doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy are comfortably placed on the Race to Tokyo rankings. The likes of Saina Nehwal, Kidambi Srikanth, and women’s doubles pair of Ashwini Ponnappa and N Sikki Reddy will have to make a big push to qualify.

Srikanth played in the Denmark Open in October. The rest of the top shuttlers will start with the Thailand Open from Jan 12. The calendar, announced till the Tokyo Olympics, will see three back-to-back tournaments in Bangkok – Asian leg – including the BWF World Tour Finals which was postponed last year.

The world rankings will be reopened following the World Tour Finals. “Qualification will be determined from the Race to Tokyo Rankings published on May 18 2021. This will also be used for seedings the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021,” BWF said in a statement

“The focus has been to establish cluster tournaments where possible similar to what is planned for the Asian Leg in January in Thailand and we expect to stage a number of tournaments this way to ensure a more feasible tournament programme in 2021,” said BWF secretary general Thomas Lund.

“The Covid-19 situation continues to provide a challenging environment in which to run international tournaments, and although the hope is that the COVID-19 vaccine may in time create a world with less restrictions, BWF expects that the pandemic will still influence tournament hosting throughout the whole of 2021,” he said.

The BWF Council has also approved a support package offering financial assistance and cost relieving initiatives to hosts “The support will help hosts cover the costs of implementing BWF COVID-19 protocols which includes testing, arrangements around hotel safety, cleaning, provisions of face masks to participants, and sanitising equipment,” said Lund.

“There is also the possibility to reduce total minimum prize money for 2021 in the effort to reduce costs, but BWF would encourage all hosts to keep minimum prize money levels as high as possible for the benefit of our top players,” he added.