Indonesia Rallies Past China to Its First Asian Games Men's Badminton Title in 28 Years
China's badminton men led the Asian Games team final 2-0 in Nagoya before Indonesia took three straight matches to win the title for the first time since 1998, hours after China's women reclaimed their own crown.
China's badminton men arrived at the Asian Games team final in Nagoya bidding for a third consecutive title and promptly took a 2-0 lead. An hour later they were holding silver. Indonesia won the last three rubbers of Thursday's final 3-2, ending China's two-title run and taking its first men's team gold at the Asian Games since 1998.
Everything had gone to plan at first. Shi Yuqi beat Jonatan Christie in two comfortable games, and the doubles pair Liang Weikeng and Wang Chang edged Alfian and Fikri in three to put China on the brink. Then the tie turned. Li Shifeng lost his singles in three games, He Jiting and Liu Yi went down in straight games in the second doubles, and Weng Hongyang, sent out for the decider, could not stop the rot. Chinese fans had a term for the shape of the collapse — 让二追三, "concede two, chase three" — the same reversal that had befallen the men's table tennis team against Japan earlier in the evening.
The defeat capped a strange evening for Chinese racquet sports: within the space of a few hours, the men's table tennis team also lost a team final to Japan for the first time since 1990. For the badminton federation the night carried a sharper contrast, because the women had reclaimed their own team title earlier in the week, ending a twelve-year wait of their own. One federation walked back to the athletes' village that night with the sport's two team trophies split between its men's failure and its women's success.
The result reset the balance of power in Asian men's badminton, at least for now. Indonesia's generation has been closing on China's for several seasons, and in Nagoya its depth told exactly where the final was decided — in the lower half of the singles lineup and the second doubles. State media's match report noted dryly that China had "failed to complete the three-peat"; the defeat was sitting on Baidu's hot-search board within the hour.
China's men remain in Nagoya for the individual events, where Shi Yuqi and the doubles pairs will get their own chance to answer for the final. For Indonesia, the wait is over: a men's team title the country had not lifted since before half its squad was born.