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This week's BWF World Rankings delivered some blows to Indian shuttlers ahead of the Paris Olympics. Primarily, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, the nation's brightest hope for a medal at the Games, slipped down from their World No.1 spot.
This comes after the duo made a surprise first round exit from the Singapore Open, before withdrawing from the Indonesia Open Super 1000 altogether. With this, Rankireddy and Shetty are now ranked third in the world behind China's Liang Wei Keng/ Wang Chang and Denmark's Kim Astrup and Anders Skaarup Rasmussen.
Elsewhere, the women's doubles category in the BWF World Rankings brought some relief for Indian badminton enthusiasts. Both the pairs of Ashwini Ponnappa/Tanisha Crasto and Treesa Jolly/Gayatri Gopichand moved up in the chart.
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Scheduled to compete in the Paris Olympics, Ponnappa and Crasto climbed a rung to become the new World No.19, while Jolly and Gopichand jumped six spots to World No.24.
Meanwhile, men's singles stars HS Prannoy and Lakshya Sen retained their ranks. Prannoy continues to be the World No.10, while Sen is still ranked 14.
Meanwhile, Kidambi Srikanth didn't fare as well, falling out of the top 30. He is now the World No.32, his lowest rank in a decade. In the women's singles of the BWF World Rankings, PV Sindhu retained her World No.12 rank.
Paris Olympics seedings will be decided based on BWF World Rankings
Going into the Pairs Olympics, the importance of the BWF World Rankings will increase as they decide the seedings for all shuttlers. In the singles events, there will be 16 seeds in both the men and women, while only four doubles pairs per each event will be seeded at the Games.
The seedings for Paris will be decided based on the rankings published on July 9th. Till then, the Indian shuttlers have three chances to improve their rank, namely the Australian Open, the U.S Open, and the Canada Open.
The Australian Open is already underway, and only HS Prannoy is scheduled to participate at the Super 500 in Sydney.
Based on the rankings at this juncture, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty can expect to be seeded in the men's doubles, while Prannoy, Lakshya Sen, and PV Sindhu are seeded in the singles.
