Some athletes chase records; An Se-young is lapping them. On September 29th the 23-year-old South Korean beat Japan’s Yamaguchi Akane 21-17, 21-9 at the Ichinomiya City Gymnasium in Aichi prefecture to retain her Asian Games badminton singles title—something no woman had managed since badminton became a medal event at the 1962 Jakarta Games. Add the 2023 Hangzhou gold, August’s world championship and a career grand slam completed in April, and the case for calling her the most dominant athlete in her sport becomes less an argument than a formality.
The final, played against a hostile crowd on her opponent’s home soil, was tighter than the scoreline suggests. Yamaguchi, world number three and beaten in all five previous meetings with Ms An this year, attacked from the off and led 6-3 in the opening game. Ms An levelled at 8-8, was reeled in again at 16-16, and closed it out regardless. In the second she fell behind 4-5 after a burst of Yamaguchi smashes, then won seven straight points—a burst of the clinical, almost algorithmic shot-making and defence that has earned her comparisons with a badminton-playing artificial intelligence.
The numbers border on the absurd. Ms An’s record this year is 56 wins and one defeat—a 98.2 per-cent win rate—and the single loss was a mid-match retirement through injury at the Japan Open in July, not a defeat on points. Within a month of that foot injury she was back, sweeping the world championships, the China Masters and now the Asian Games in succession. Last year she won 11 titles, matching the single-season record.
In Aichi she scarcely broke sweat: five singles matches, ten games, just 89 points conceded—fewer than nine per game. The gold was her 46th international title, pulling her level with Susi Susanti, the Indonesian great who long stood alone atop the list. Next on the horizon are next year’s Asian championships and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where she could complete an unprecedented second career grand slam.
Empty seats for the coronation
If the badminton was sublime, the stage was shoddy. The Aichi-Nagoya Games have consumed 298bn yen (about 2.56trn won, or $1.9bn) of public money, according to a report by the Newsis news agency, yet the stands have stayed stubbornly empty. Where South Korea’s three main broadcasters gave the Games blanket coverage, a single Japanese terrestrial channel carried selected events—and often omitted popular sports even when home athletes were competing.
Part of the explanation is cultural. Many Japanese fans regard the Asian Games less as a medal contest than as a training exercise; the baseball squad, for instance, consists of company-team amateurs rather than professionals. But organisational blunders have compounded the indifference. The choice of medal events raised eyebrows—esports titles owned by private firms, including Puyo Puyo, Street Fighter and Battlegrounds, all featured, and an 11-year-old Japanese schoolchild won gold in the first of them.
Worse was the ticket fiasco. Organisers initially trumpeted sales of over 90 per cent, only for the opening ceremony and venues to reveal swathes of vacant seats; the organising committee’s secretary-general later conceded that unsold tickets remained and that sales trends were unsatisfactory. The resale market told the truer story: on the secondary site Ticket Jam, baseball and volleyball tickets with face values above 10,000 yen traded for as little as 699 yen, and even the showpiece South Korea-Japan football final changed hands below face value, between 3,000 and 6,000 yen—many of them corporate freebies dumped online.
Local critics, cited by Newsis, blame a lazy assumption that a disinterested public would not notice sloppy preparation. It is a harsh verdict on 298bn yen of spending. For Ms An the pageantry was presumably incidental; medals count the same won before packed stands or empty ones. But there is something melancholy about a record-tying 46th title being sealed in a half-silent hall. Greatness deserves witnesses.