Badminton Tournament Simalakama Fruit, Risk But Needed

Indonesian mixed doubles pair, Praveen Jordan / Melati Daeva Oktavianti (Photo: PBSI)

JAKARTA - The Badminton World Federation (BWF) has released a tournament schedule, one of which is the BWF Tour. The top-class tournament will begin at the end of August.

The BWF Tour calendar will open with the China Masters 2020 tournament on August 25-30. In fact, this tournament was held on May 5-10. However, it had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Indonesian mixed doubles coach, Nova Widianto, hopes that related parties will not rush into holding tournaments. Especially if the conditions are not stable.

"If it is not too safe, you should not rush. Do not force it because it will be very dangerous for athletes," Nova said in a virtual conference, Thursday.

However, he admitted that the tournament was very much needed. There is a dilemma because participating in a tournament is very important to increase the ranking of athletes.

This is agreed by the head coach of Indonesia's mixed doubles, Richard Mainaky. According to him, the rest of the tournament this year will be very important. The tournament in the rest of the season can become a warm-up event for the 2020 Olympics.

As is known, no tournament has been held since the All England was held in mid-March 2020. The players are now only busy with training routines.

"So if the competition can start again, of course it will be good and can be used as a reference for evaluation before going to the Olympics later," said Richard.

He added that it would not be a problem if the remaining tournaments were not counted by Olympic qualifying points. According to him, there are several other important things that can be learned.

"Points from the rest of this tournament are still included in the world ranking, and there is also a price money for children," he said.