India left Germany with both singles trophies from the Hylo Open, a Super 500 event on the BWF World Tour held in Saarbrücken. PV Sindhu won the women’s final and Lakshya Sen followed with the men’s title a little later, and neither dropped a game on finals day.
Sindhu, a former world champion with two Olympic medals, needed just 39 minutes to beat Denmark’s Line Højmark Kjærsfeldt 21-12, 21-14. The Dane led briefly early on, but a run of five straight points swung the opener and the Indian never really let go after that. She had already lifted a trophy in Tokyo this summer, and only seven days earlier she had lost the French Open final, so this marks her second title of the year. With 9,200 points added to her tally, her hopes of reaching the year-end finals for the tour’s best players look much brighter. She thanked her support team, saying there had been days when she felt “absolutely low”.
For Sen, the win meant even more. Ranked 14th in the world, he had gone out at the very first hurdle at six events in a row, and his last title dated back to the Australian Open a year ago. Against Indonesia’s Jonatan Christie he wobbled once, letting an 18-10 lead in the first game shrink almost to nothing, before closing it 21-17. The second game was one-way traffic, 21-10. Sen admitted afterwards that he had waited a long while for a trophy and said clear wins over top-class rivals had brought his confidence back.
The doubles titles were spread around. France’s world champions Thom Gicquel and Delphine Delrue edged a Danish pair in a tight three-game mixed final, Indonesia’s Amallia Cahaya Pratiwi and Siti Fadia Silva Ramadhanti beat the top seeds in the women’s event, and Danes Christian Faust Kjær and Rasmus Kjær won their first World Tour title together.
