photo by Raphael Sachetat
Reigning World Champion Xia Xuanze’s prospects of defending his
title at the 2005 IBF World Championships in Anaheim have taken a
dive, as the International Badminton Federation has today announced
it will not be using its wildcard allocation for the world meet
(15-21 August).
This means the wildcard places in each of the
five events will instead be offered to the next eligible players in
line from the qualifying world ranking list of 19 May.
For Xia – men’s singles gold medallist at the 2003 event
in Birmingham (ENG) – his last chance of defending his crown now
rests with the Chinese Badminton Association. If
he’s to compete at the Arrowhead Pond in August, they would need to
drop one of their three star shuttlers – Lin Dan, Bao Chunlai and
Chen Hong – to make way for the 27-year-old from Zhejiang.
The next eligible player in the men’s singles list is Vietnam’s
promising shuttler Nguyen Tien Mihn, who was one of the first intake
of players at the IBF World Training Centre in Saarbruecken,
Germany.
Peru’s women’s singles player Claudia Rivero and Scots men’s
doubles pair Graeme Smith and Andrew Bowman will also get the nod in
place of the vacant wildcard spots, as will Leena Loytomaki and
Saara Hynninen of Finland in women’s doubles, and Lithuanians Tomas
Dovidaitis and Kristina Dovidaityte in mixed.
As the host association, USA badminton also have a wildcard entry
for each of the five events, and are set to hold trials later this
month to determine who will compete.
Meanwhile, National Associations have until today (2 June) to
confirm whether their players from this first wave of invitations
will compete at the event. An updated list of
qualifiers will be published on Monday 6 June.