An Se-young wins Korea's first badminton women's singles title in 29 years

Korea secured three medals in badminton at the Hangzhou Asian Games on Saturday, with An Se-young winning gold and two duos of Choi Sol-gyu and Kim Won-ho and Baek Ha-na and Lee So-hee claiming silver.

Korean badminton player An Se-young competes in the women's singles final against Chen Yufei of China at the Hangzhou Asian Games held at Binjiang Gymnasium in Hangzhou, China on Saturday. [NEWS1]

Korea secured three medals in badminton at the Hangzhou Asian Games on Saturday, with An Se-young winning gold and two duos of Choi Sol-gyu and Kim Won-ho and Baek Ha-na and Lee So-hee claiming silver.

An faced Chen Yufei of China in the women’s singles final at Binjiang Gymnasium in Hangzhou China and the match turned out to be a close contest.

She won the first game 21-18, but Chen bounced back to take the second game 21-17.

An dominated in the third game, however, winning it 21-8 for a final score of 2-1 to take gold.

The gold was not only Korea’s second gold in badminton at this year’s Asiad, but also An's second at the tournament after she won the first gold in the women’s team contest on Sunday last week.

An, who was crowned world champion in August, is the first Korean to win the women's individual contest at the Asian Games since 1994, when China was still an emerging player in the sport and Korea was dominant.

Choi and Kim, on the other hand, took on Rankireddy Satwik Sairaj and Shetty Chirag Chandrashekhar of India earlier in the day in the men’s doubles final and suffered a 2-0 loss after losing first two games 21-18 and 21-16, taking silver.

Baek and Lee played against Chen Qing-chen and Jia Yifan of China in the women’s doubles final and also lost the match 2-0 — losing the first game 21-18 and second game 21-17 — to claim silver.

The three medals on Saturday allowed Korea to end the Asiad with a total of seven medals — two gold, two silver and three bronze medals.

Those numbers are a significant increase from the 2018 tournament, when Korea failed to win a single medal in the sport, and marks the first time since 2002 that Korea has managed to win more than one gold medal in badminton.

BY PAIK JI-HWAN [paik.jihwan@joongang.co.kr]