Loh Kean Yew begins his title defense in the first round of the World Championships

Loh Kean Yew, the reigning badminton world champion, started his defense of his championship on Monday (August 22) with an easy victory over Pablo Abian, a player from Spain.

In just 29 minutes, the Singaporean won 21-12 and 21-12 against the 58th-ranked player in the world Abian to advance to the second round of the BWF World Championships. The competition may be found in Tokyo, which is located in Japan this time around.

Both of these players are meeting one another for the second time in their careers. In the 2017 edition of the Dutch Open, Loh won all three games against Abian.

Kevin Cordon of Guatemala, who is 25 years old and presently rated ninth in the world, will be the player the young American faces next.

During the World Championships of the previous year, Loh embarked on a miraculous run that led him to victory. Along the way, he defeated a number of higher ranked players, including the Olympic winner Viktor Axelsen, and ultimately took home the championship.

After Jason Teh was knocked out in the first round of the men’s singles competition, Singapore’s sole representative in the competition is Loh. 86th in the world rankings Mark Caljouw of the Netherlands defeated Teh in two sets, 13-21 and 14-21.

In the men’s doubles competition, the team of Terry Hee and Loh Kean Hean got their season off to a winning start with a victory. Following their 21-17 and 21-18 victory over Christo Popov and Toma Junior Popov of France, they will compete against Ong Yew Sin and Teo Ee Yi of Malaysia.

Hee and Jessica Tan, on the other hand, received a walkover and moved on to the next round of the mixed doubles competition. The husband-and-wife team that just recently took home the gold medal in this competition at the Commonwealth Games will now compete against the twelfth seeds from Japan, Yuki Kaneko and Misaki Matsutomo.

Yeo Jia Min, who holds the number one spot in the world rankings for women’s singles and who indicated last week that she would not be participating in the competition, will not be competing in the women’s singles event.

After returning from the Commonwealth Games, the player ranked 18th in the world revealed in an Instagram post that she had become infected with COVID-19, which was the second time she had been exposed to the virus.

Even though Yeo has made a full recovery at this point, she revealed that the positive result from her polymerase chain reaction test has not changed, which indicates that she will not be allowed to enter Japan.