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Chinese Taipei's Tai fortunate to be part of centralised programme

Dubai - Women's badminton is seeing slow progress in her country despite the appearance of world class male players from the island.

by

Moni Mathews

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Published: Sat 12 Dec 2015, 9:53 AM

Last updated: Sat 12 Dec 2015, 11:56 AM

Chinese Taipei's 21-year old Tai Tzu-ying has virtually all of her right calf muscle covered with the medicated KT tape or elastic therapeutic tape.
The defending champion here in 2014, has problems when the stretches and rallies get longer as was the case in the two opening rounds of her Group A matches against Carolina Marin and Japanese ace Nozomi Okuhara, which she lost. "The right thing to do at this stage is to play within the limitations and not try to get hurt further as the new season is just a short period away," Tai said.
Daughter of a firefighter and a senior city council member, Tai picked up the sport from her parents who after marriage, started to play the game for recreational purposes. "My mother and later my father helped me with the racquet hold and the simple initial steps and from then on I started to take a deeper liking for badminton," she added.
Women's badminton is seeing slow progress in her country despite the appearance of world class male players from the island.
"The grassroot developmental programmes are few in my country when it comes to women. There are promising hands around but they have to be centralised and their skills improved and fine tuned by the right coaches and schemes," she continued.
"In my case I have been fortunate that I managed to get into the central national programme once I reached the high performance stage."
In 2011, she won the Taiwanese ranking competition when she was only 16 years and 6 months old, being the youngest number one in Taiwan badminton history.
Tai was the finalist at the 2010 Singapore Open and she won her first international title at the 2011 US Open Grand Prix Gold at the age of 17.