KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 3 ― After their last outing in the All-England championships in March, the national badminton squad are looking forward to two Badminton World Federation (BWF) World Tour Super 1000 standard competitions in Bangkok, Thailand in 2021.
Badminton Association of Malaysia (BAM) president Tan Sri Mohamad Norza Zakaria announced the governing body has agreed to send national players to the two tournaments as preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics scheduled in July 2021.
“We will send our players who are qualified according to world rankings to the two championships,” he told Bernama today.
Recently BWF confirmed that the Badminton Association of Thailand (BAT) would be organising the Yonex Thailand Open from Jan 12 to 17, 2021 and the Toyota Thailand Open from Jan 19 to 24, 2021.
The two BWF World Tour championships held this year were the Malaysia Masters from Jan 7 to 12 and the All-England from March 11-15.
The top eight of all four categories in the BWF World Tour rankings would be eligible to join the BWF World Tour Finals for the 2020 season from Jan 27 to 31 in Bangkok, offering an overall prize money of US$1.5 million (RM6.235 million).
At the same time, Mohamad Norza pointed out that the national squad need not worry about their health safety during the two tournaments as BAT has set the standard operating procedure (SOP) for the two competitions to prevent the spread of Cvid-19 pandemic.
BAM had earlier decided not to send players to the Denmark Open in Odense last month as it was not confident with the SOP put up by the organiser to contain Covid-19 in the tournament. ― Bernama
