Contrary to an over-the-moon feeling after Sri Lanka’s mixed doubles pair of Sachin Dias and Thilina Hendahewa won a gold medal at the Odisha Super Open 100 Badminton Tournament in Cuttak, India this week, the irony is that a previous pair of Sachin Dias and Bhuwenaka Gunatilleke had won a medal in an Asian country some years ago.
As such winning at an Asian event is even harder considering the rankings of the opposing players and the win by the duo of Dias and Gunatilleke should be considered a better achievement as the best youth players in Asia contested the event.
According to analysts, the win by Dias and Hendahewa this week can come nowhere near the feat by Dias and Gunatilleke.
Rohan de Silva the president of Sri Lanka Badminton while congratulating the pair of Dias and Hendahewa for winning a gold medal this week and the support team, acknowledged that no one should be carried away by the win.
The Sunday Observer learns that the Sri Lankan players had first participated in a tournament called the Syed Modi Open and the men’s singles and doubles players lost in the first round. Results and rankings can be found in the WBA website.
Participation in Indian Open events helps a player to obtain ranking points and qualify for other Asian and World Championships. Thus Dias and Hendahewa have obtained some ranking points with this win.
They beat the Indian pair of MR Arjun and Treesa Jolly in just 36 minutes which is very rare as the standard of Indian players are high as well as in their world ranking points.
But the world ranking of India’s Jolly was 207 which is very low by Indian standards. But it has risen to 138 because of her participation in this tournament. Rankings can improve after each tournament.
Besides, there were only two pairs of players from other countries. One pair was from Zambia and an unknown pair from Malaysia whose ranking is 1894 in the world.