Badminton Asia Team Championships cancelled

The Bangkok Post reported Wednesday that the Badminton Asia Team Championships, which were supposed to have been held  in Bangkok in February 2016,, had been cancelled by the Granular Badminton Club, which was to have been the title sponsor.  According to the Post report, the cancellation came after a dispute between the Badminton Association of Thailand (BAT) and the Granular Club, whose president is running for the BAT presidential post.

The Badminton Asia Confederation (BAC) has since confirmed the cancellation of the championships in Bangkok and has announced that it is looking for an alternative venue.

The team championships have undergone significant changes in recent years.  Until 2010, the BAC normally just held a regional qualifying tournament for the Thomas and Uber Cups.  However, in 2012, China chose to participate in the event, which they also hosted, even though their men’s team had already qualified for the Thomas Cup Finals as the defending champions.  The rules allowed for the event to be staged as a continental team championship, as they had already been in Europe.  In 2014, the BWF temporarily resorted to a method of selecting participant teams for the Thomas and Uber Cup Finals based on their team ranking system.  However, the rules have since reverted and the team championship is again to be used.

In 2012, many observed at the time that it was an opportunity to earn large numbers of points from a team competition, particularly for second or third singles or doubles players, who may not have been fielded at the Sudirman Cup, the only other team event yielding points counting toward Olympic qualification.  This time again, players such as Sho Sasaki and Wang Shixian are likely to be on the defending champion teams but they currently have no ranking points from team competitions.  The need is even greater for doubles pairs, such as Ko Sung Hyun / Shin Baek Cheol, Angga Pratama / Ricky Karanda Suwardi, or many of the top women’s pairs from Korea, China, and Japan, who need to be in the top 8 to qualify as a second pair from their team to go to Rio.