Royalty and Revolution: An Se Young Reigns Supreme, Alex Lanier Stakes His Claim

At the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium, where rallies stretched like questions and the shuttle repeatedly disappeared into the white glare above the court, An Se Young and Alex Lanier gave badminton two sharply different versions of greatness.

An, South Korea’s Olympic champion and world No. 1, reclaimed the women’s singles crown with a 21-17, 21-14 defeat of Japan’s defending champion Akane Yamaguchi. Lanier, 21, overwhelmed Japan’s Kodai Naraoka 21-11, 21-11 to become France’s first men’s singles world champion. One victory confirmed an era; the other opened a frontier.

Badminton is often described as fast, which is true but insufficient. At its best, it is an argument conducted at impossible speed: a game of pressure, deception, breath, and nerve. In New Delhi, An and Lanier did not merely win their arguments; they changed the vocabulary.

For An, the decisive fact was not just that she beat Yamaguchi for a second World Championships title. It was the manner in which she absorbed the familiar Japanese resistance, patiently turning defence into domination. Tied at 17-17 in the opening game, An unleashed four consecutive points to close it out, before surging from 11-10 to a 21-14 finish in the second. Their final was another chapter in a long rivalry, and the scoreline was straight games, but the work beneath it was anything but simple.

Yamaguchi has long been badminton’s tireless metronome, capable of turning any attack into another demand for precision. Against that kind of opponent, impatience is defeat disguised as ambition. An resisted the temptation to force points. She retrieved, waited, and then struck into the narrow spaces that appear only when a rival is made to move one step too many.

Her title run also carried the shadow of vulnerability. Before the championships, An had been recovering from a left-foot problem, yet her tactical authority never wavered. A champion’s body can be compromised; her timing cannot be.

The obvious reading is that An simply remains too good. The truer one is more interesting: she has become exceptionally difficult to rush. Her athleticism may seize the eye, with the elastic lunge, the last-second recovery, and the racket face arriving under the shuttle as if summoned, but her greatest advantage is psychological. She makes elite opponents feel that their best attacking shot is merely the beginning of a longer point.

That is why her second world title, after her 2023 breakthrough in Copenhagen, feels less like a repeat than an evolution. Three years ago, she became South Korea’s first women’s singles world champion. In Delhi, she returned as the player everyone had prepared to solve and still found no satisfactory answer.

Lanier’s ascent, meanwhile, was a different kind of theatre. Where An’s triumph carried the weight of expectation, his came with the crackle of surprise. France had never had a men’s singles finalist at the World Championships, but by Sunday evening, it had a champion.

Lanier did not arrive in the final untested. In the quarterfinals, he overturned a first-game loss to 2023 world champion Kunlavut Vitidsarn, having trailed 3-11 in the second, to win in 78 draining minutes. Then came an 85-minute semifinal against Canada’s Victor Lai, where Lanier recovered from a game down to win in three. This was not a charmed run through a broken draw; it was a young player learning, point by point, that he could live inside the furnace.

And then he made the final look almost serene.

Against Naraoka, one of the sport’s most indefatigable retrievers, Lanier won 42 of 64 points in a 50-minute demolition. Trailing 7-9 in the opening game, he turned on the heat to take 13 of the next 14 points. From 14-11 in the second, he rattled off seven straight points to seal the match. Naraoka usually turns a court into a maze, but Lanier found the exits first.

That French revolution extended well beyond singles play. Mixed doubles pair Thom Gicquel and Delphine Delrue set the stage earlier in the day, stunning top-seeded Chinese duo Feng Yan Zhe and Huang Dong Ping 22-20, 19-21, 21-15 in an hour and 18 minutes to secure France's first-ever World Championship gold. Coupled with Lanier’s victory, France became only the second European nation in history to claim multiple gold medals at a single edition. Not to be outdone, South Korea celebrated a double-gold haul of its own as Baek Ha Na and Lee So Hee ended a 31-year wait for a women's doubles crown. By upsetting top seeds Liu Sheng Shu and Tan Ning 21-15, 21-15, they claimed Korea's first title in the discipline since 1995, with the 32-year-old Lee becoming the oldest women's doubles world champion in history.

With China facing the threat of going goldless for the first time since entering the World Championships in 1983, third seeds Liang Wei Keng and Wang Chang stepped up under immense pressure. The pair defeated former world champions Aaron Chia and Soh Wooi Yik of Malaysia 21-16, 21-17 to capture their maiden world title and preserve China's proud 43-year streak. As the dust settled inside a roaring stadium, the Delhi crowd cheered home favorites Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand as they collected India's hard-earned women's doubles bronze, capping off a historic tournament that redefined badminton's global hierarchy.

His victory challenges a stale assumption about men’s badminton: that its centre of gravity must remain confined to the traditional Asian powers, with Europe occasionally allowed a spectacular visitor’s pass. France’s new generation has been building toward this, and Lanier now gives that movement its most authoritative proof.

Two champions. Two tempos. An Se Young offered the quiet authority of a player who has made endurance an art form. Alex Lanier played with the clear-eyed audacity of someone who sees history not as an inheritance, but as an invitation.

The next question is not whether they belong at the summit, because Delhi answered that. It is whether the rest of badminton can learn to live with the new horizons they have drawn.