Ramdhani helps team to gold, win individual bronze
GUYANESE national badminton champion, Narayan Ramdhani, is now ranked third best in the Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA) after a stellar performance at the association’s National Badminton Championships.
The event was contested from Wednesday to Saturday last at the Dalhousie Agricultural Campus in Nova Scotia, Canada.
The Kings University student, who represented the Alberta Colleges Athletics Conference last week, was instrumental in helping them to win the team’s championships.
To win the gold, it was Ramdhani who defeated Ramnish Kumar of Humber College 2-1.
In the individual championships, he defeated former silver medallist, Yuge Zeng, of George Brown College. Zeng, who was named best male student athlete for his school last year, was flawless during the group playoffs. The experienced player, however, had no answer for Ramdhani and went down 21-15, 21-13 in the third-place game.
Ramdhani, who made history for the Kings University Eagles badminton team after winning a gold medal in the men’s singles at the 2018-2019 ACAC Provincial championship last month, had gone down to his rival, Nicolas Pitman, in the semi-final of the CCAA Nationals.
He had defeated the Concordia player in February (16-21, 21-17 and 21-17), and looked set to do that again, but a tight battle in the second set gave Pittman momentum, which resulted in a 2-1 (17-21, 23-21 and 21-12) win.
The 20-year-old Guyanese, who is also ranked as the top player in the ACAC and as Kings University’s best badminton player, had only seven and a half months training in Edmonton, Canada before he began his dominance.