Over the past few weeks, the badminton community has been hit with a number of tournament cancellations. These have been due to precautions being taken against the spread of Covid-19.
The largest tournament cancellation on European soil has been the German Open, a World Tour Super 300 event that was due to take place this week. Many players were subsequently left with an unwanted gap week in their calendar. One such affected pair is Stefani and Gabriela Stoeva who say.
- German open is one of our favourite tournaments and when we heard that it is cancelled, we felt disappointed because we were looking forward to it.
Extra pressure
The Stoeva sisters are currently the highest-ranked European pair in the road to Tokyo, in qualification spot number nine, but still felt the pressure of the recent announcements.
- For sure it is kind of negative because it is the Olympic qualification. The last months of this period are the hardest because anything can happen all the way until the last moment. We do not want to put extra pressure on our shoulders through this. We are just trying to always give our best on court and to achieve good results. This gives us the motivation to keep up the hard work.
The All England Open is due to take place next week in Birmingham. The Stoeva sisters have had a terribly tricky draw, with their opening match against reigning champions and number one seeds, Chen Qing Chen and Jia Yifan. In their four previous encounters, the European Champions recorded their only victory in the 2018 China Open quarterfinal. They will of course be using this week to prepare and focus on this key match-up.