KUALA LUMPUR, July 22 (Bernama) -- The national badminton players are reminded to fully focus on getting past the group stage first at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris which will officially open this Friday until Aug 11.
Chef de Mission (CDM) of the Malaysian Contingent to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Datuk Hamidin Mohd Amin said he did not want to see the players feeling pressured if they were too focused on advancing as far as possible in the competition held at the Porte de la Chapelle Arena from July 27 to Aug 5.
"It's true that we really want gold, but the important thing is to let them cross to the quarter-finals.
"If you think you want to be champions, all of that will put a heavy burden on the athletes to focus, so just target the group stage, qualify for the quarter-finals, move forward to the semi-finals and final," he said in an audio shared by the Badminton Association of Malaysia (BAM), today.
Hamidin, who inspected the final preparations of the national badminton squad in Lille, said the selection of the location was a strategic approach arranged by BAM considering that it is located approximately 219 kilometres (km) from Paris.
He said, the players are also getting ready to give their best performance at the world's biggest sports event.
The country's professional men's singles player Lee Zii Jia has an easy passage in the group stage after being drawn alongside Sri Lanka's world number 72 Viren Nettansinghe and Spain's world number 63 Pablo Abian in Group G.
For the women's singles event, national professional player Goh Jin Wei was drawn alongside South Korea's Kim Ga Eun and South African Johanita Scholtz in Group H.
The men's doubles competition will see the 2022 world champion, Aaron Chia-Soh Wooi Yik drawn in Group A along with the top seeds from China, Liang Wei Keng-Wang Chang, Ben Lane-Sean Vendy from England and Canadian doubles, Adam Dong-Nyl Yakura.
The country's leading women's doubles Pearly Tan-M. Thinaah, on the other hand, face a difficult task when they are in the same group with the top seeds Chen Qing Chen-Jia Yi Fan of China in Group D with world number six doubles Mayu Matsumoto-Wakana Nagahara of Japan and world number nine doubles Apriyani Rahayu-Siti Fadia Silva Ramadhanti from Indonesia.
National mixed doubles Chen Tang Jie-Toh Ee Wei have a good chance of passing the group stage when drawn in Group D along with the second seeds Feng Yan Zhe-Huang Dong Ping of China, United States doubles Vinson Chiu-Jennie Gai and Singaporean pair Terry Hee Yong Kai-Jessica Tan Wei Han.
Only the group champion for the singles event advances to the round of 16 while the top two doubles in the group qualify for the quarter-finals.
-- BERNAMA
