Fullerton, on the final Sunday of June, gave Su Li-yang the moment he had chased for years. The Chinese Taipei shuttler beat former world No. 1 Kidambi Srikanth of India to win the men's singles crown at the Yonex US Open 2026, a BWF Super 300 stop and the first professional title of his career.
How Fullerton was won
The final ran one hour and nine minutes and turned on patience. Su Li-yang got off the blocks fast, opening a 10-5 lead in the first game. Srikanth found his footing and levelled at 10-10. Then Su answered in the most decisive way, taking seven consecutive points to close the opening game 21-15.
The second game belonged to the older man. Srikanth kept pace through the first half, then changed the tempo, moving from 15-13 to 20-13 before converting his fourth game point to force a decider. The effort cost him. In the third, the two stayed level to 9-7, and there the match tilted for good. Su took eight straight points, and the game folded 21-9. The margin at the end was severe; the contest before it was not.
Srikanth, at 33, was facing an opponent nine years his junior, and the legs told their own story late on. His run to the final carried its own footnote: in a tense semifinal moment, with officials refusing to correct a wrong call, the Indian walked to the referee and conceded the point to Japan's Okimoto, a small act of sportsmanship on the road to the final. Su reached the last match by eliminating Rounak Chouhan in the semifinals.
A long climb behind one title
The result reads as a breakthrough because the years behind it were lean. Su, 24 and ranked world No. 46, defeated the world No. 38 at the seventeenth BWF World Tour stop of the season. He had known success before, but only in the junior ranks, with two gold medals in BWF junior competitions in 2018 and 2019. In 2023 he took silver at the Taipei Open, alongside four runner-up finishes at lower-level BWF international challenge and series events. The final step kept eluding him.
His coach, Lee Sung-yuan, described a player caught in a familiar trap. Su had a habit of playing hastily, trying to end matches quickly and prove himself, and the repeated failures to convert had drained his confidence. The instruction in Fullerton was the opposite of instinct.
That was why when facing Srikanth today, he was asked to be patient and control the pace.
He did both. The seven-point surge in the first game and the eight-point close in the third were not bursts of haste but control held until it counted. It was also a good weekend for Chinese Taipei more widely, with a mixed doubles title taken on the same day.
For a player long stalled short of the top, one restrained final rewrote the trajectory. The first title tends to be the hardest. Su Li-yang has his.
