Swinging between jolly jokes and sobbing tears, He Bingjiao keeps her elegant game going | Badminton News

He Bingjiao knew she would be playing one of her Chinese teammates in the semifinals of the French Open last week because that’s how the draw had stacked them up. Speaking to the BWF after her quarterfinal, she was asked in jest if she would share the dinner table that night with her mate-slash-opponent or join them ahead of the semis the next morning, at breakfast.“I might knock on the door to wake her up at midnight!” she goofed about, dipping into humour that she’s known for. The beamingest of smiles and guffaw was back, as October wound down at Rennes in France.
The month had started in a pool of tears at Hangzhou for He Bingjiao. Losing the team final gold at the Asian Games, Bingjiao played the third rubber and went down to Kim Ga Eun as China were humbled 3-0 Korea. Under tremendous pressure to net that team gold playing at home, Bingjiao couldn’t pull one back against the spirited Koreans who are always a handful and wolfish with their bite in team events. Images of Bingjiao looking up at the roof to unsuccessfully stem tears rolling down, against the backdrop of a celebrating Korean huddle, went across the world.
There was also much consternation among Chinese netizens, as they watched Kim and her coach Sung Ji-Hyun stare up at the roof and beat back their own tears, before giggling, which was construed the Chinese as imitating and mocking He Bingjiao’s disconsolate grief. The Koreans would deny any such thing was aimed at her. But Bingjiao continued to be inconsolable on the podium as a silver was hung around her neck.
It wasn’t the first time that Bingjiao had given vent to her emotions. She can be a happy, jolly competitor at most times, and is a thoughtful athlete, also a thinking shuttler, a pleasure to interact with post her matches where she really tries to converse and articulate her game. But Bingjiao is also a super sensitive soul, who throughout her career can be brought to tears, and is shattered a loss. She goes to pieces and doesn’t swallow it all up.
While the likes of Carolina Marin, PV Sindhu and An Se Young scream and shout and express themselves uninhibited after every point, so nothing stays bubbling on the surface, others like Yamaguchi, Tai Tzu Ying, Ratchanok and Chen Yufei have a calmer, controlled disposition and a lid on tear glands. Everyone hurts after a loss, but Bingjiao seems to be affected acutely ebbs and flows, especially in pressure cauldrons of home events. She’s quick to joke and grin and laugh, and quick to tear up. Amongst the plethora of inscrutable shuttlers and the excitable aggressive ones, He Bingjiao is a rarity.
Beyond her seven titles on the Tour, Bingjiao has several matches against the top names where she’s gritted it out and ensured her classical game is supplemented solidity. It would be rank unfactual to call her mentally fragile, for she has often played cerebral games, both deceptive and creative to carve out many top wins. The defense has been sturdy, balance and fluidity surreal and strokes to all four corners threaded with smooth racquetwork as she’s notched wins against every top name, including the first four times she played An Se Young and became a sort of a nemesis before the Korean began to read her.
Yet, there are epic meltdowns. The Asiad at Hangzhou was the latest in line of defeats at home. She bounced back, as she often does, claiming bronze beating PV Sindhu in the quarters in the individual event. But the opening week of the Games had ended in a complete breakdown.
It was at the 2018 World Championships against Carolina Marin that she famously had her nerves come undone, and frayed beyond help. Playing the semifinals at home, she took the opening set, was parried back in the second the Spaniard, and went into one right funk at the break of the decider.
Not unlike the Asiad, the pressure of the home crowd would get to her as her eardrums got annoyed the decibels and she would blurt out to coach Xia Xuanze: “Crowd is too noisy.” He would chastise her about how the same din hadn’t affected her earlier and how she should focus on her tactics. But a mix of Marin’s cloying chokehold on her, her net stomping, and the crowd cheers would tear down her composure. As the coach urged her to get it together, she would do the He Bingjiao thing – sob under a towel. At the 2022 World Championships, Marin came from four match points down to score 6 in a row, and leave the Chinese flicking off silent tears.
Bingjiao is known to get overwhelmed, and playing Thai Busanan in a midnight match once, she got so knackered with the punishing rallies, that she cried in dress though she won the match at the French Open. Completely tired, she knelt in front of her kitbag and buried her head into the towel, needing to be consoled Busanan and coach Luo Yigang. Bingjiao plays a beautiful, unrestrained, artic style of badminton that you can’t take your eyes off, but there’s brutality to the strain she puts her mind under, that the physical battles shred her nerves.
Bingjiao’s on-court behavior has always been impeccable, and she rarely celebrates when she wins a point off opponents’ makes. You wonder if screaming her bubbling emotions away might be a better thing to do.
It’s not just in losses that Bingjiao has fallen apart. It was clear she was sensitive to other triggers too. When Beiwen Zhang suffered a nasty Achilles injury and slumped in acute pain, Bingjiao would be briefly dazed and then go on to comfort her. But in the mixed zone later, she couldn’t hold herself back, broke down, and talked of how she didn’t want to see opponents suffer injuries and leave the court in this manner. Badminton’s unforgiving physical demands and broken bones, overwhelm her.
Though she’s racked up losing streaks this year – three times to Chen Yufei, all six times to An Se Young, and 4 times to Carolina Marin between 2018 and 2022, Bingjiao has shown fortitude in flipping the result against Marin last autumn and was seamless against Sindhu in nailing down the Asiad bronze.
It hasn’t always been easy for the woman labelled a prodigy at 16, who was perennially compared to career graphs of fellow prodigies Intanon Ratchanok, Akane Yamaguchi and Chen Yufei back home.
The shuttler, who enthusiastically converses in English, plays PUBG with volunteers, takes auto rickshaw rides in Delhi and is very popular with her quips, carries a flip side to her bubbly countenance. There’s an endearing story about how she wound up in badminton: the school badminton coach promised to treat her to chocolates every day if she picked the shuttle over gymnastics. She loved chocolates, and easily learnt the racquet sport. As a teen, she loved Sherlock Holmes mysteries obsessively, and ever since she picked English, she’s been watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S reruns. Yet on a badminton court, she struggles to relax if things go south especially playing at home.
Forever chided for her ba-fat and stocky frame when young, she did manage to win Youth Olympic Gold beating Akane Yamaguchi in 2014 at her home courts in Nanjing. There was much excitement in China when she outwitted Tai Tzu Ying. (A caption read ‘Chub Cheeks’ Bingjiao has defeated the mighty Tai ‘Killer Abs’ Tzu Ying’). Yet, every time she lost, critics would fixate on her weight and fitness, urging her to get nimble and leaner. As such, her footwork and reading of the game were so ethereal that the court movement was as good as anyone’s. Most Read
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Chinese shuttle diehards would at some point, inspired how Yamaguchi was supported in Japan, begin to back her, citing examples of how Maradona and Garrincha were stocky but ace athletes. Her elegant left-handed game when on song, was a treat to watch, though she had Srikanthesque ability to frustrate fans with errors.
Comparisons with the cool, controlled Chen Yufei and her subsequent Tokyo gold meant she would race ahead, but He Bingjiao was urged to follow in footsteps of Deng Yaping, who despite being just 5 feet became one of the greatest TT players in hory. Bingjiao shot up to 5’6″, and slowly settled into a game that challenged the best names in the world. Given that really tall women’s singles shuttlers ruled in China in the 1990s and 2000s, Bingjiao’s gorgeous southpaw game without the altitude took its time to reassure the Chinese, though the class was evident even at age 16.
Through tumult of debilitating pressure and highs of some silken wins, He Bingjiao has managed to stay in the Top Ten as China’s No 2. She underachieved and has stayed a step behind the Fab Four. But for the emotional shuttler who’s had tears roll down her cheeks more than once in full public glare, the bounce back sees her ready to fight again, and always ready to return with a twinkle in her eye and a happy joke.