Badminton Denmark director before the WC: “Unprecedented opportunities in the Royal Arena”
The WC in badminton begins on Monday in the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, and Denmark fields 16 players across the categories. It will be the biggest tournament on Danish soil ever, and it is also a record for a country to have held five world championships.
The last one on Danish soil was in 2014, but with the Royal Arena, which is tailor-made for events like this, you can count on a show that has never been seen before in badminton, the organizers have promised.
What this entails is of course exciting to hear.
Flashscore caught the director of Badminton Denmark, Kristian Pinderup Langbak, for a chat about the expectations for this year’s event in the badminton world, as well as how the perspectives look in relation to the running of the tournament and the resulting interest.
And he was of course excited like a child before Christmas Eve, combined with a strong conviction that it is going to break the boundaries of what we have experienced in relation to a badminton event here at home.
“It’s just going to be so cool! It’s almost 10 years since we last had the WC on Danish soil, but we’ve never been in a hall like the Royal Arena before,” says the director.
“The venue gives us some unprecedented opportunities, and we have used this to go full throttle on everything from lighting and sound to the player presentations before the matches,” he elaborates.
Viktor Axelsen and Anders Antonsen are among the Danish stars during the WC
Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix
But they have not had to use light and sound to have already drawn attention to themselves. There is thus great interest from both at home and abroad.
He can report on a number of approximately 250 awarded press accreditations, of which approximately 100 are for foreign media people, as well as a ticket sale that is going very well, although they only make a serious assessment of the latter once the tournament is over. The part-out tickets were already sold out in December.
“Our goal is to deliver a fantastic World Cup within the financial framework that has been set aside for it, and we think that is absolutely realistic,” he says, when asked whether the expected sales have been achieved.
“We don’t just expect that everything will fall into place by itself, and we will then squint at the numbers along the way, but in relation to the significance for the annual result for Badminton Denmark, I expect that, as far as the WC is concerned, we will stay within for the budget.”
In addition, at the time of writing, a few days before the tournament begins, they have not yet been able to hang up the red lights in relation to ticket sales. And it has a logical explanation.
Ticket sales start “from the back”
“It starts from the back, so to speak, with the ticket sales, which means that people have bought tickets for the last days, when the decisive matches are played. You don’t buy for individual matches, but for whole days, so it’s the first three or four days that tickets are still available,” explains Kristian Langbak, who can reveal that around 20% of the sold tickets have gone to foreigners.
Although it is not the first time that Denmark has held a Badminton WC, it is the first time for the director, who has been in the post since 2022, and he says that they do not draw so much on experience from a ten-year-old final round, which they draw on the annual holding of the Denmark Open, which is one of the world’s biggest tournaments.
“Good enough, this is the fifth time we have held the WC, but we have held the Denmark Open over 70 times, and every year we have been able to gain new experience there, which we have been able to use in planning the WC. And in relation to drawing attention to Denmark as a nation, we know from the Badminton World Federation’s previous figures that we have a potential “reach” (viewers, ed) of 600 million people, who of course are largely from Asia. In Spain in 2021, there were 150 million unique TV viewers in China and India alone, so there is no reason to believe that there should be less with this year’s tournament,” concludes Kristian Langbak hopefully.
The WC Badminton starts today (Monday, red), and of course you can follow along on Flashscore.
2023-08-21 11:42:25
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