Kuala Lumpur: In a recent interview with IFeng News station from China, Malaysia’s badminton legend and former World No. 1 Lee Chong Wei admitted that after the intense battle with Lin Dan in the semi-final of the 2016 Rio Olympics, although he walked away with victory 15-21, 21-11, 22-20, he was completely exhausted and couldn’t recover on-time to play against Chen Long in the final.
As a result, Lee lost to Chen Long 18-21, 18-21 in the final, and won his third Olympic silver medal in Rio.
“After the semi-final match, my coach told me this was only semi-finals, it’s not final yet.”
“I was completely exhausted at that time. In less than 24 hours, I am going to play another match. Due to my age at that time, my body couldn’t recover quicker compared to younger athletes. At that time, Chen Long was 20+ years old, he definitely recovers quicker than me.”
Indeed, at that time, Lee was 33 years old and about three months away from his 34th birthday, while Chen Long was 27 years old.
Coincidentally, in another video posted by Lin Dan on his social media platform, he also mentioned the 2016 Rio Olympic semi-final match against Lee Chong Wei, and he shared the same viewpoint that he didn’t have enough time to recover before the bronze medal match.
“At that time, I was 33 years old. After the semi-final match, in less than 12 hours, I needed to play in the bronze medal match.”
“Lee needed to play in the gold medal match. In fact, our body hadn’t recovered yet.”
“I want to let BWF know that the intensity of badminton is very high. For instance, like Tennis, for men’s singles, after the semi-final, they can take a day off before the final.”
“The intensity of tennis is far from badminton. The rest period for badminton players between matches is extremely short.”
“I think BWF didn’t take this detail into consideration and kept changing things that are irrelevant to the sport, such as the new 1.15m serving rule, I think that’s meaningless and it doesn’t make sense.”
Lin Dan then lost to Viktor Axelsen 14-21, 15-21 in the bronze medal match.
