Ace Indian shuttler Kidambi Srikanth eased his way to a bronze medal with a straight sets win over Singapore's Teh Jia Heng in the men's singles badminton at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham on Sunday.
The experienced Indian barely broke a sweat, overcoming his lower-ranked and young opponent 21-5, 21-18 in the bronze medal match.
Meanwhile, young Indian duo of Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand also won a bronze medal with a 2-0 win over Australia’s Chen Hsuan-yu and Gronya Somerville in the women's doubles final.
Srikanth, thus, made amends for his semi-final loss earlier in the day with the bronze medal win against Jia Heng, who gave his all despite being under some visible discomfort.
With this win, the World No 13 now has four medals to his collection of trophies from Commonwealth Games.
The 29-year-old had won a silver in the mixed doubles team event in Birmingham a few days back. He also has a mixed team event gold and a singles silver respectively from the 2018 edition of Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast.
It could have been an all-Indian men's final with countrymate Lakshya Sen winning his semi-final match, however, Srikanth squandered a first game advantage to lose to lower-ranked Tze Yong Ng of Malaysia 21-13, 19-21, 21-10 in the other singles semi-final at Birmingham.
Maiden CWG Bronze for Treesa-Gayatri Pair
The Indian women's doubles pairing of Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand beat Australia’s Chen Hsuan-yu and Gronya Somerville to bag bronze in Birmingham.
The two 19-year-old's have now won a medal in their debut CWG campaign. It was not the easiest of affairs as the young Indian duo had to toil hard to register a 21-15, 21-18 win against the experinced Australian pair.
Treesa and Gayatri had earlier lost to the seasoned Malaysian pair of Thinnah Muralitharan and Pearly Koon Le Tan in the semi-finals in straight games.
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