The 17-year-old Japanese women’s singles player, Tomoka Miyazaki, is slowly showing a competitive threat.
Miyazaki’s career has been on the rise since being selected for the Japanese National Training Team A this year.
At junior level, the special talent of the player who is still attending high school in Japan has already been noticed.
Miyazaki managed to become the 2022 Junior World Champion by defeating his fierce enemy from China at that time, Yuan An Qi.
Since then, Miyazaki’s achievement rate has continued to soar.
He started winning BWF tournaments at senior level at Super 100 level until most recently at Super 300 through his victory at the 2024 Orleans Masters.
After becoming champion in France, Miyazaki still made surprise after surprise because he succeeded in beating big names at the 2024 Swiss Open which was held a week later.
The two big names he beat were PV Sindhu (India) and his own senior, Aya Ohori. Miyazaki made it to the semifinals before losing to Carolina Marin (Spain).
Realizing how special Miyazaki’s performance was, Chinese badminton legend Cai Yun, who is now the CBA (China Badminton Association) national training mentor, was also amazed.
“We have observed the extraordinary growth of young overseas players and perhaps this result is part of his hard work,” said Cai Yun quoted by BolaSport.com from Aiyuke.
“However, what we saw was that he showed maturity on the ball and sharpness in areas that young players usually don’t have,” said Cai.
Fu Hai Feng’s former partner and 2012 London Olympic gold winner did not deny that Tomoka Miyazaki will kick off new competition in women’s singles now.
Miyazaki is also said to be similar to the achievements of the current world badminton queen, An Se-young from South Korea.
What Miyazaki and An have in common is that they have both skyrocketed since the age of 17 and are competing in the prestigious BWF tournament among senior players.
“I saw it (that special talent) in this little girl, which is definitely praiseworthy” said Cai Yun.
“She looks a bit like An Se-young. I also saw her in situations and circumstances like the core when An first appeared,” concluded An.
At a very young age, 17 years old, Miyazaki has now skyrocketed to a good ranking of 25th in the world as of April 2 2024 in the week 14 BWF ranking update.
This ranking means that Miyazaki can enter the main draw, aka the main round of BWF elite tournaments at the Super 750 or Super 1000 level.
Even at Super 500 and below, he no longer needs to crawl from the qualifying round.