Commonwealth Games champion Lakshya Sen suffered a shock defeat by the hands of Japan’s Kenta Nishimoto within the first round to make an early exit from the Japan Open Super 750 badminton event right here on Wednesday.
The 21-year-old from Almora, a 2021 world championships bronze medallist, went down 21-18 14-21 13-21 to world quantity 21 Nishimoto in a males’s singles match that lasted an hour and 6 minutes.
It was his first defeat to the Japanese in two conferences.
Fast-rising males’s doubles pairing of MR Arjun and Dhruv Kapila, who jumped 9 locations to succeed in world quantity 26 after a quarterfinal end on the World Championships, misplaced 21-19 21-23 15-21 to Korean mixture of Choi Sol Gyu and Kim Won Ho.
Mixed doubles pair of Juhi Dewangan and Venkat Gaurav Prasad misplaced 11-21 10-21 to Chinese high seed Zheng Si Wei and Huang Ya Qiong in 23 minutes.