Tokyo: Japan’s World No. 1 men’s singles player, Kento Momota gave badminton fans a big sigh of relief as he was able to return to training last Saturday, after three weeks of treatment and recuperation from his eye surgery.
Momota survived a fatal car crash in Malaysia early January, but had to undergo surgery to repair a right eye socket fracture, which was causing double vision. His orbital floor fracture was obviously to be a result of January’s traffic accident.
The 25-year-old was originally expected to need three months recovery time.
After winning the BWF World Tour Finals last year, Momota had already qualified for the Tokyo Olympic. In fact, racking up enough points during the 2019 season had actually played to the advantage of Momota, given that BWF has been cancelling several recent Olympic qualifiers due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Due to all these cancellations, his World ranking was not affected even if he couldn’t compete in several tournaments in the first half of 2020 due to the injury lay-off.
Japanese media had reported that in order to avoid injury again, Momota would not participate in any competitions before the Olympics and will stay in Japan for training.
