Malaysia’s disappointing badminton campaign at the Asian Games has prompted fresh questions over the team’s approach, with veteran sports analyst Datuk Dr Pekan Ramli calling on the Badminton Association of Malaysia (BAM) to demand greater accountability from its players.
Malaysia returned from the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games with just one badminton medal, a bronze won by women’s doubles pair Pearly Tan and M Thinaah. The result fell short of BAM’s official target of one silver and one bronze.
While Pearly and Thinaah provided Malaysia with its only podium finish, the rest of the squad struggled to make a deep run across the individual and team events.
Pekan questioned whether too much attention was being placed on the Olympics at the expense of other major competitions, including the Asian Games.
“Are we interested only in the Olympics?” he asked, expressing disappointment with Malaysia’s overall showing and suggesting that a stronger winning mentality is needed from both the association and its players.
Malaysia’s early exits highlighted the scale of the problem. Leong Jun Hao and Justin Hoh were eliminated in the men’s singles last 16, while Wong Ling Ching and K Letshanaa also failed to progress deep into the women’s singles draw.
The men’s doubles also suffered setbacks, with Goh Sze Fei-Nur Izzuddin Rumsani and Aaron Chia-Tee Kai Wun both exiting in the second round. Mixed doubles pairs Goh Soon Huat-Shevon Lai and Chen Tang Jie-Cheng Su Yin also failed to reach the latter stages, while both Malaysian team events ended in the quarter-finals.
Source: The Sun Malaysia
For Pekan, world rankings should not be the main measure of whether players are expected to succeed at major events.
“Being world No. 1 does not guarantee a gold medal,” he said, stressing that every player should be given clear expectations to compete seriously for medals regardless of their ranking.
He also warned against placing all the pressure on Malaysia’s highest-ranked players. According to Pekan, doing so could allow other members of the squad to feel less responsibility for producing results.
Instead, he wants BAM to establish clear key performance indicators for every player and enforce them consistently throughout the season.
Pekan argued that the level of pressure should not rise only when the Olympics approach. He called for higher standards to be maintained year-round, with players expected to meet specific targets at major tournaments.
Failure to meet those targets, he suggested, should also have consequences, including the possibility of being left out of future tournaments.
The Asian Games campaign has therefore become more than a disappointing medal tally for Malaysia. For Pekan, it has exposed the need for BAM to reassess how it sets expectations, measures performance and maintains competitive urgency across the entire national squad, rather than relying primarily on Olympic ambitions.
