Taipei: 2021 was a significant year for Tai Tzu Ying of Taiwan who is expected to return to the World No. 1 ranking after the 2022 BWF World Championships.
Tai Tzu Ying talks about her retirement plan with Badminton World Federation (BWF):
The current World No. 2 Tai revealed in an interview published by BWF two days ago that she originally only wanted to play until the end of 2021, but she had changed her mind now, as she just want to go with the flow and play as much as she could, without thinking too much.
“I don’t know, I really have no idea about my current retirement plan. Perhaps I’m older now, and I don’t think about retirement as much as before. I’ll just go with the flow, if I can play, I’ll continue. If I can’t, I’m completely fine,” said Tai.
“My initial plan was to play until the end of 2021, but after completing last season, I felt that I could still continue playing,” added Tai.
“I hope I can persevere until the end of this season,” continued Tai.
Tai said that she didn’t play at any tournaments after competing at the three back-to-back tournaments in Thailand early last year and went straight to the Tokyo Olympics.
In Tokyo, she was a little unfamiliar with the feeling of competition.
“Initially, I was focusing on getting into the right condition because after the three Asian leg tournaments in Thailand, I had not played until the Olympics in July. As a result, I felt a bit uncomfortable and I was trying hard to get into match condition,” explained Tai.
Even though Tai eventually lost to Chen Yufei of China in the Tokyo Olympics women’s singles final, she accepted the defeat gracefully.
“I was okay with the result although the loss was hard to swallow. I told myself I did great because I could at least step onto the podium,” said Tai.
In addition to winning the Olympic silver medal, Tai Tzu-Ying also won the silver medal at the 2021 World Championships.
At the end of the interview, Tai said she was satisfied with her overall performance in 2021.
“I thought it was OK last year. At least I achieved my goal, which was to be able to stand on podiums at different tournaments.”
