26-year-old Tokyo Olympic silver medalist retires from Badminton

Chinese men’s doubles specialist Li Junhui announced his retirement from the sport on Friday, the 12th of November.

The world no.4 Li Junhui along with his partner Liu Yuchen had an outstanding career. Though they made their debut(seniors level) in 2012, they first made their mark in 2013 when they won back-to-back gold medals at the Asian Junior Championship and the BWF World Junior Championships.

Li Junhui and his partner had a superb 9-year career with the Chinese national team and won some of the most prestigious championships including the 2018 Thomas Cup, 2018 Asian Games (men’s team gold), and 2019 Sudirman Cup.

They also have won a total of 11 BWF titles that include 6 Grand Prix gold, 2 Superseries, and 3 World Tour titles.

At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, this young pair came close to realizing their dream of winning the gold medal at the Olympic Games but lost to the Taiwanese pair of Lee Yang and Wang Chi-lin and settled for a silver medal.

The 26-year-old Li Junhui took to his Weibo account and announced that he will no longer be part of the Chinese national team and will be retiring from all forms of badminton due to repetitive injuries.

He wrote, “Because of the injury, I cannot cope with the normal training plans designed for the national team. This extremely disturbs my mind and my spirit very often. Competition in men’s doubles badminton is very fierce. High-intensity training is the basic guarantee for victory. Because of my injuries, I am very sorry to announce today that I will be withdrawing from the national team and retiring.”

His retirement shows that badminton today has become a physical game rather than a skill-oriented one. Today along with good skills one needs to be physically very strong to be able to get a close shot of winning a championship.