Vietnam Open 2026: Nguyễn Tiến Minh Wins Qualifier at 43, and the Gap Behind the Main-Draw Ticket

Nguyễn Tiến Minh walked onto court for the qualifying round of the Vietnam Open 2026 with two facts sitting side by side in my notebook: age 43, world ranking 254. The tournament runs from September 8 to September 13, 2026, sits in the Super 100 tier of the Badminton World Federation World Tour, and gathers more than 300 players from 27 countries and territories. His opponent, Nguyễn Hoàng Thái Sơn, is a young player raised in doubles. Minh won. Speaking afterwards, he said his opponent was "not strong in singles" and that he had relied on his own "strength and speed" to advance.

A 43-year-old winning a qualifying match at a Super 100 event — read that line alone and a reader could fold the newspaper shut. But I have sat in enough arenas to know that small news items like this are usually where a system confesses its weaknesses. On the same day, Lê Đức Phát — the other leading name in Vietnam's men's singles — walked on court with painkilling injections in his knee and heel, his wife watching from the stands. Nguyễn Hải Đăng lost. In the men's singles draw, the Vietnamese player who went furthest was the oldest one.

Ahead of Minh in the main draw is Zhe Ying Wu of Taiwan. That section of the draw contains no top seeds from China or Indonesia. That detail is necessary to read the scale of this event correctly, before anyone rushes to call this qualifying win a sign of revival.

Super 100: the tournament everyone can enter, and therefore few remember

Super 100 sits at the lower end of the World Tour system. Ranking points and prize money are modest compared with the Super 500, 750 or 1000 tiers. For a young player, it is a ladder for collecting points and learning international competition. For a player at the end of a career, it is the surface that remains if he wants to keep the feel of competition without facing the world's top ten from the first round.

The figure of more than 300 players from 27 countries and territories sounds imposing, but it needs to be read properly: a large entry does not equal elite quality. A Super 100 attracts regional players hunting points; it is not where the giants stop. The draw therefore opens opportunities for people like Minh, and it also sets limits on every conclusion drawn from it.

The single-elimination format further blurs the picture. One loss ends the tournament, so draw luck carries more weight than at events with group stages. In qualifying that is doubled: a player has exactly one match to prove he belongs in the main draw. A doubles player pushed into the singles draw, meeting a genuine singles player on exactly that day, has almost no room to correct mistakes.

There is one detail I always write down before a tournament: who is absent. At the Vietnam Open 2026, the absentees are Asia's leading seeds. That says more about the event's standing in the international calendar than any interview could.

A doubles serve and the 92-centimetre gap

A badminton court is 13.4 metres long. In singles the court is 5.18 metres wide; in doubles that figure is 6.1 metres. A difference of 92 centimetres sounds small, but it changes entirely how a player must move, defend and finish a rally.

In singles, one person covers the whole surface. The shuttle must travel longer, the patience must run deeper, and rallies generally last considerably longer than in doubles. In doubles, two people share the space; the front player acts as the blocker, the partner behind creates pressure. Good doubles players tend to have excellent short-range reflexes, serve low and tight to the net, and instinctively end rallies early with a smash from above.

Those skills do not transfer directly to singles. A low doubles serve becomes a weakness in singles, because the opponent only needs to push the shuttle deep to force the server back into the corner. The habit of waiting for a partner to cover behind becomes a gap in the middle of the court. And the impatience to finish the point — a doubles instinct — is exactly what a veteran singles player knows how to exploit.

I do not have the data to assert that Minh did precisely these things against Thái Sơn. Smash speed, average rally length, unforced-error rate — none of those numbers are in my hands. But his own words afterwards, that the opponent was "not strong in singles