Thomas Cup 2024: highlights + the players’ shoes

This week I’m trying something new. I’ve prepared an exciting summary of last week’s Thomas Cup in Chengdu, China. It comes with all the drama and spectacular highlights you’re used to from top-tier badminton tournaments.

This also serves as an excuse for me to assess which badminton shoes are the most popular among the pro players right now. If you’re curious about your favorite player’s model, you’ll find that too (provided they participated in the Thomas Cup 2024).

Since this tournament doesn’t follow your typical format, let’s begin with a quick reminder of how it works.

The Thomas Cup is known as the men’s world cup for countries and is played over the course of a week or so. That means each player is representing their country rather than competing individually as is the case during usual tournaments on the BWF World Tour.

As such, each round is played as best of five matches with the usual 2-3 games per match played right after one another.

These five matches are made up of a combination between singles and doubles matches, but the order can change. For example, during the group stage, each round might have one singles match followed by a doubles match, another singles match, and so on, until all five matches are played between two teams.

On the other hand, some quarter-finals play all their singles matches before moving on to their doubles matches. Don’t worry, it sounds more confusing than it is in the real world.

A team has to win three matches (i.e. two singles- and one doubles match) to win the round. In the group stage, all five matches are played even if one team is ahead 3-0 because the number of games and rallies won can affect the overall scoreline in case of a tie down the road.

But there’s a fun twist that makes this event more exciting for Western nations where the singles discipline tends to be more popular. It’s technically possible to win each round by only winning the singles matches since there are three of them and only two doubles matches.

That is especially exciting for underdog nations like Denmark where singles is the preferred discipline. There’s still a chance to snatch the title from dominant nations like China, Indonesia, and India with exceptionally strong players across both singles and doubles disciplines.

Now, you might be wondering what the women and mixed double pairs are up to during this tournament.

There’s a counterpart for women held at the same time and venue, called Uber Cup. Since this mini-guide is an experiment, I won’t be covering that today, but I might in the future if you’re interested.

In some cases, the mixed doubles pairs are participating with a different partner in the male- or female doubles discipline during this tournament. In others, they aren’t participating at all.

With this overview out of the way, let’s dive into the summary and highlights of this 2024 event of the Thomas Cup.

Keep in mind that there will be spoilers, so if you want to watch the games later you might wanna skip this (if you just want to know more about the gear used by the pro players this year, skip to the last chapter).

Thomas Cup 2024: highlights

The group stage breaks up the 16 teams that qualified into four groups with four countries in each group. They play one match against each other and the two countries with the most wins in each group advance to the knock-out stage with the last eight countries.

Next, there’s the quarter-final, semi-final, and final as is common in most sports tournaments. When you lose you’re knocked out.

For your convenience, I’ll follow a chronological order of the tournament starting with the best highlights from the group stage before covering each round of the knock-out stage.

The group stage: any surprising exits?

First, here’s an overview of the groups and the countries playing each other.

Next is the same table, but with the results of the matches.

While there are plenty of highlight reels on BWF’s Youtube channel, they didn’t cover all matches and not all of the highlights were as exciting as others.

So I took the liberty of going through everything that I could find to share the most exciting highlights — those that are more exciting than your typical good smash or dramatic rally. I’ll cover the following categories:

1. Dramatic situations with umpires
2. Surprise wins + shock exits + advances to the next round
3. Cool rallies and tricks that stood out

Highlight 1

Jan Louda from the Czech Republic wins the first set against Nishimoto from Japan and nearly the second set too!

Highlight 2

Surprisingly, Thailand did not advance from the group stage (but all the other teams that did are the usual suspects, so there’s just one team “too much” with only eight spots)

Highlight 3

Incredible defense from Lee Zii Jia (Malaysia)

Highlight 4

Around the back defense shot

Highlight 5

Kento Momota’s defense and net touch (it’s crazy how sensitive and skilled he is at the net considering his Yonex Astrox 99 Pro racket is so head heavy).

Highlight 6

Two highly entertaining rallies between LJZ and Axelsen

If you want to watch future matches live (i.e. the Olympics), bookmark this guide on live streaming badminton.

The quarter-finals: will the last non-Asian nation get knocked out?

The quarter-finals took us through four exciting matches:

• China vs India (3-1)
• Malaysia vs Japan (3-1)
• Denmark vs Chinese Taipei (1-3)
• Korea – Indonesia (1-3)

While the games were intense and entertaining, there weren’t any major headlines worth noticing besides Denmark, the favorite in the match against Chinese Taipei, losing out on the semi-finals.

Sadly, Kento Momota (Japan) didn’t get to play the last singles game against Malaysia as they won in the fourth match. That means the last match of his career during an international tournament was at the group stage.

Highlight

The semi-finals: will the two powerhouses make mistakes?

From the quarter-finals, we’ve come to the final four teams:

• Indonesia – Chinese Taipei (3-0)
• China – Malaysia (3-1)

Highlight

The final: the battle for the title

Finally, it was down to the final two teams to battle it out.

• China – Indonesia (3-1)

Highlight

Thomas Cup 2024 players’ badminton shoes

Before ending this Thomas Cup 2024 summary, let’s dive into the shoes the players have used during the tournament.

This is possibly the only event (except for the Olympics) that allows the players to wear gear from multiple sponsors. You see, each country’s national team has a gear sponsor and each individual player has their own sponsor.

That means that the clothes they wear on court is their national team uniform, sponsored by the national team’s sponsor rather than the individual player. On the other hand, it’s unreasonable to expect players to learn to use new gear just for one tournament, so they are still allowed to play with their usual racket, strings, handle grip, and shoes.

That’s why you’ll see some players wear competing sponsors like Victor apparel with Yonex gear, as is the case with Viktor Axelsen as shown below. Here he’s wearing Victor apparel as Denmark’s national team is sponsored by them, while playing with his Yonex Astrox 100ZZ and Yonex SHB 65z3 shoes.

During my extensive research in preparation for this guide, I attempted to find the rackets for each player, but it turned out to be a huge undertaking as most players don’t have updated information about their gear, even on their sponsors’ websites. I was able to find some which I’ve included below.

Before diving into the overview showing each participating player and their current badminton shoes, here are my observations from looking up the badminton shoes of more than a hundred pro players.

Observations

To my surprise, Yonex’s ultra-lightweight performance shoes (the Yonex Aerus Z2) aren’t as popular among the pros as you’d expect, despite it being meant for speed, performance, and tournaments at least based on its marketing. Only 2.6% of the players use it. 

Without knowing for sure, I figure it’s due to the pros preferring slightly more cushioning for longevity instead of going all-in on raw speed and less injury prevention.

The most popular shoe by far is the Yonex SHB 65z3 with 63% (72 players out of 115 used it) of the players using it during this tournament. That surprised me as I didn’t find it particularly amazing compared to other flagship models.