Hanoi: Vietnam’s top badminton player Nguyen Hai Dang has won the title of the 32nd Iran Fajr International Challenge after beating Indian seed No. 1 Karunakaran Sathish Kumar, who is now the world’s No 49.
This is the first international championship that the Vietnamese player, ranking 97th in the world, has earned in his career. Previously, Dang’s best achievement on the professional playground was being runner-up at the 2022 Croatia Open Badminton Tournament.
With the victory, Dang got 4,000 points on Road To Paris, ranking among 34 players who are likely to secure a berth in the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. Now he has 20,870 points in total while Dmitriy Panarin, a Kazakh player, who ranked 34th on the ‘Road To Paris’ list with 20,310 points.
According to the regulations of the Badminton World Federation (BWF), the top 34 players on the list will win a slot in the Olympics.
Born in 2000 in Ho Chi Minh City, Dang won the national youth championship in 2011, 2017 and 2018. Before stepping onto the world
stage, Dang caused a domestic shock in early 2023. A slot in the second round of the Thailand International Challenge 2023 pushed him to place as the world’s No. 163, which made him the new national No 1. March 14, 2023 was a special day for Vietnamese badminton as Dang ended Nguyen Tien Minh’s 21-year dominance in Vietnam./.
Source: Vietnam News Agency
