What Sport Science Changed in Badminton, and What the 3×15 Will Ask of Us

On 23 August, at the Indira Gandhi Arena in New Delhi, France won two world titles on the same day: first Thom Gicquel and Delphine Delrue in mixed doubles, beating Feng Yanzhe and Huang Dongping 20-22, 21-19, 21-15, and shortly afterwards Alex Lanier in men’s singles, beating Kodai Naraoka 21-11, 21-11. Both were the first world titles in the history of French badminton, and the Badminton World Federation itself pointed out that no European nation had reached that mark since 1977, and that a European gold in a paired event had been missing since 2009. When something like this happens, the usual reaction is to look for the explanation in the player, in the moment, in the draw that opened up, or in that convenient word we reach for when we would rather not analyse too much, which is talent. All of that is probably part of it, but there is a piece of the explanation that almost never gets told because it cannot be seen from the stands, and it is the one that gets built over years in the gym, in the physio room, in the load sheets, and in the meetings where it is decided what gets trained and what does not.

A few days ago the Hindustan Times published an article by Sandip Sikdar under the title “How badminton evolved into a physical slugfest”, written from New Delhi during the World Championships, in which players and coaches give their view of how the physical demands of badminton have changed over the last decade. The central idea of the piece is that the game has gone from being above all a sport of finesse to becoming a test of endurance, power and aggression, and the reasons given there strike me as particularly interesting because they do not point to any single exercise or method, but to a general shift in the level. The game is more physical because everyone defends well now, because far more people are competing at the top, and because the gaps between them have narrowed, so that you no longer find the clearly attacking players and the clearly defensive players you saw fifteen years ago, and to be among the best you need the full package. Matches are faster, they last longer, and they demand more muscular endurance and more power, with recovery turned into a pillar of the daily routine rather than something added on afterwards. And there is one point in that article that I find the most honest of all, the one about the psychological cost: surviving a brutal match is one thing, and doing it again the next day, and the day after that, is something quite different, and for that there is no secret formula.

That article describes the what very well. What interests me is the how, and above all who made that how possible, because the physical level of a sport does not rise on its own: it rises because someone inside the structures decides that it matters and manages to get space made for it.

I started working with the Chinese national team in 2018, and on my first day I was told that badminton is not trained like this. That was not hostility, it was simply the accepted view at the time, and not only there: it was more or less the view across the sport. When I brought tennis balls into coordination and activation drills, someone told me, with complete naturalness, that this was badminton and not tennis. The warm-up was still stretching and continuous running, and changing that, integrating it into the session rather than treating it as the formality before the important part, was one of the first things that had to be justified. And the load data went unused for a long time: collected, analysed, presented, and then decisions were made exactly as they had always been made. When a system has been winning for decades it is entirely reasonable for it to distrust the outsider who arrives saying things could be done differently, and I understood that then and I understand it better now. But it is a fair picture of where the sport was eight years ago, and it is worth remembering now that we take for granted things which back then had to be justified every single week.

What I built was less a system than a way of working resting on two legs. The first was integrating knowledge from other disciplines, because the badminton literature was very thin and much of what existed was not particularly applicable, and extrapolating from other intermittent sports was the only way to have something solid under our feet, as long as you declare that you are extrapolating and do not sell as direct evidence what comes from another population. The second was my own experience and the mistakes I had made along the way. On top of that came a fortunate circumstance, which is that Catapult provided us with the GPS units free of charge, so we could start genuinely quantifying what was happening on court. But if I had to keep one single factor from all of that, it would not be the technology: it was the players who believed in it. Without them no data is worth anything, because a monitoring system the athlete neither understands nor shares in becomes just one more form to fill in.

The first cycle, the Tokyo one, was far more complicated, and the reason is simple: I did not have much freedom in decision-making, and a methodology that cannot touch the planning ends up being a decorative appendix. In the second cycle the situation changed completely, because we had full autonomy to configure the training ourselves in all its aspects, with the support of the players, and we designed the process together. The culmination was the Paris Games, and what I remember most about that is not a particular result but the fact that we enjoyed the process and were able to apply everything we believed in on the basis of sport science. I am not going to say that we won because of it, partly because I do not know that and partly because performance is multifactorial, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What I can say is that the difference between one cycle and the other was not a difference in knowledge, it was a difference in decision-making margin.

What you see at tournaments has also changed a great deal. In 2018 there were very few support professionals, very few strength and conditioning coaches and very few physios, and in the halls you would see players doing extensive continuous running in the middle of a tournament. Today, at those same tournaments, you see strength work, mobility work and recovery protocols, with competition as the priority and with a real concern for maintaining fitness across a calendar that involves an enormous amount of travel and weeks of competing. That change did not come out of a paper, it came out of a lot of people pushing at the same time in a lot of different teams.

And I think this last point deserves to be said plainly, because it sometimes gets lost among all the methodological argument: today’s athletes are better prepared than those of fifteen or twenty years ago. Not because they are tougher, and not because they train more, since in many cases people probably trained more back then, but because there is more knowledge available and because there are professional teams around the player that simply did not exist before. A player who today has a strength and conditioning coach, a physiotherapist, a nutritionist and a psychologist, and who moreover has those people coordinated with each other and with the coach, arrives at competition in a state that twenty years ago was flatly unreachable, however much talent and willingness you poured into it. This has also changed the figure of the coach, who has gone from being the person who decided absolutely everything to being the person who coordinates a group of specialists, and that transition is not comfortable for anyone, because it means acknowledging that there are areas where somebody else knows more than you do, and that this does not take authority away from you but makes it more solid.

This is where I come back to France, with a caveat I want to state before going any further: I do not know the French system from the inside, so I am in no position to explain their success and I am not going to attempt it. What I do know is that their high performance structure sits within INSEP, which is a hugely respected institution with a long tradition of bringing research, sports medicine and training together in the same place, and that is not a minor detail: having your players inside an environment like that means access to those services does not depend on the particular sensibility of one coach, but comes with the institutional framework itself. There are also statements from the people involved that point in the same direction. Last August, Xinhua published comments from one of the French national team players attributing the team’s progress to the development of a professional system, explaining that in recent years France had significantly increased funding for badminton and strengthened the national team programme, and that players now had access to physical trainers, mental coaches and a full support staff. The same article noted that France had brought in some of the best coaches in Europe and had invested heavily in coach education. And in New Delhi, right after the final, the head of the French doubles area gave an interview that went viral in China precisely because she spoke about load control and about working intelligently. When a message like that circulates and gets discussed, it is usually because it resonated with something people already suspected.

My own experience with Spain, Germany and England points in the same direction. In those structures sport science is more integrated, more is invested in it, and above all there is less reluctance when it comes to making decisions based on what the data and the professionals who generate it are saying. And there is one name that deserves explicit recognition, which is Fernando Rivas, who spent years working in a way that shifted the model towards far more scientific training, with Carolina Marín as the most visible example of that process. That said, I do not want to oversimplify in the opposite direction either, because sport science does not on its own explain how a country comes to compete with the major powers: you also need a base of participants, domestic competition, continuity of project, and a fair amount of luck, and anyone who reduces all of this to “they invested in science” will be making the same old mistake, only with a different flag on it.

What I do believe, and here I am giving an opinion formed from inside a traditional system, is that a national team which cannot compete on volume of players, on tradition or on resources has to win somewhere else, and those other places are almost always organisation, the quality of the daily process, and the willingness to question what is being done. And that leaves the structures which have been winning for decades facing an uncomfortable question, because when you have been at the top for a long time it is extraordinarily difficult to tell apart what works from what has simply always been done.

And as if that were not enough, the game is about to change again. The New Delhi World Championships was the last one played under the scoring system to 21, because from 4 January 2027 the standard becomes 3×15. Nobody yet knows exactly what that will mean, because there is no published competition data allowing us to quantify it, and I would be fairly suspicious of anyone claiming otherwise at this stage, so what follows is a reasoned projection and nothing more than that: with fewer points per game, the probing phase and the slow construction of the rally lose their purpose, each rally becomes proportionally more valuable, and the match turns more explosive from the very first exchange, with a total duration probably closer to what we saw ten or fifteen years ago. If that is confirmed, much of what we have built over a decade, which has been preparing players for wars of attrition of fifty minutes and more, will have to be revisited: the relative weight of endurance and power will shift, the density of training sessions will shift, warm-up and priming strategies will probably shift too, and so will fatigue management across a tournament where you play earlier and recover differently. And I am very interested to see what each of us does with that, because a rule change is one of the few occasions on which everybody is momentarily left without the excuse that this is how it has always been done, and it will show fairly clearly how far each structure and each coach is willing to evolve.

So the question I take away from the New Delhi World Championships is not what France did. It is this other one: how can we connect science with tradition without either of them having to lose, and what tools do we have so that this conversation actually happens day to day and not only at conferences?

Here are some of the tools the road has taught me, along with the mistakes I have made on it. The first is that the coach should surround himself with experts who complement him, not with people who agree with him, understanding that those experts do not take authority away from him but make him better and, above all, make the players better. The second is giving those professionals a real margin of decision, because a strength and conditioning coach or a physiotherapist who can only give an opinion once everything has already been decided is not integrated into anything, and that was exactly the difference between my first cycle and my second. The third is building a common language, so that load, fatigue and recovery mean the same thing to the coach as they do to the support staff, because most of the conflicts I have seen were not technical disagreements but people talking about different things using the same words. The fourth is involving the player in the process and explaining the why of every decision, not because it looks good, but because without their conviction the data does not get collected properly and the decisions do not hold. And the fifth, which is the most uncomfortable of all, is periodically reviewing which practices are still there only because they have always been done that way, and being willing to break with what no longer works even if we have spent years defending it, starting with our own house before anyone else’s.

None of this guarantees any result, and anyone who has read me before knows I am not going to finish by saying the opposite. But when I look back and think about that tennis ball in 2018 and about what you see today in the warm-up area of a World Championships, it seems to me that the change was made by a lot of people arguing politely with their own tradition, and with the 3×15 around the corner that is still exactly the same work we had in front of us back then.