Performance: Best of 2024

By Rolf Joho December 23, 2024 Badminton 0 Comments

23 December 2024

An Olympic and Paralympic year is always special and 2024 was no different. Players delivered performances to be proud of around the world, bringing back medals aplenty.

New names came onto the scene, while we also bade farewell to others as they left the behind the legacy of a burgeoning talent pool.

Among the high points were Daniel Bethell and Krysten Coombs’ Paralympic medals at Paris 2024.

Both headed to Paris with a medal from the Tokyo Games already in their collection and Coombs upgraded his Tokyo bronze to silver in stunning fashion.

Despite losing out in the SH6 men’s singles final, Coombs delivered up one of the moments of the Games as he played home favourite and close friend Charles Noakes in a thrilling showpiece.

Earlier on the same day, Bethell had repeated his Tokyo feat with silver in the SL3 men’s singles, just losing out to India’s Kumar Nitesh in the final, 14-21 21-18 21-23.

Bethell, Coombs and their ParalympicsGB teammates Rachel Choong and Jack Shephard helped to heighten the awareness of Para badminton in its second Games as a Paralympic sport.

Earlier in the summer, a first Olympic win for Ben Lane and Sean Vendy set the tone for England’s badminton players in Paris.

The men’s doubles pair rounded off their tournament with a 2-0 win over Canadian doubles pair Nyl Yakura and Adam Dong.

Away from the two Games, Bethell secured gold against Nitesh in the 4 Nations Para Badminton tournament in Glasgow.

And because the pair cannot seem to get away from playing one another, the SL3 world number one and three met again at the World Championships in Thailand.

A third game was needed to separate the two in the semi-final match before Bethell won 21-18 20-22 21-14.

His World Championship ended in second place after he fell to Nitesh’s compatriot Pramod Bhagat in the final, 14-21 21-15 21-14.

While Choong and Shephard did not have the Paralympics they had hoped for, they excelled earlier in the year.

The pair won back-to-back gold medals at the Spanish Para Badminton International in Toledo in the SH6 mixed doubles.

Choong and Shephard backed that up a month later in Bahrain as the former topped the podium twice in the mixed doubles and women’s singles.

In March, Lane and Vendy won their first Super 300 tournament after reaching their first final at the YONEX Swiss Open.

A dramatic final saw the pair win 24-22 28-26 against top seeds Muhammad Shohibul Fikri and Bagas Maulana from Indonesia.

Vendy reflected on the tournament: “We feel like it has been coming for a while. Every day we are consistent in our training and we are always giving our best.

“So we knew that one day it had to happen for us. And in Switzerland we put it all together and played really well.”

Their second BWF title of the year came in Saarbrucken, when they beat Denmark’s Rasmus Kjaer and Frederik Sogaard in a decider in the Hylo Open final in November.

Prior to the Olympics, Lane and Vendy claimed a silver at the Calgary Open as they lost out to top seeds Kim Astrup and Anders Skaarup Rasmussen from Denmark in the final.

Elsewhere, Marcus Ellis and Lauren Smith brought the curtain down on their careers after six years of playing together. A couple on and off the court, the pair reached a ranking high of seventh in the world in 2018, winning medals at European, Commonwealth and European Games level.