A title 21 years in the waiting
Viktor Axelsen closed out the second game with the quiet certainty of a player who had waited too long. The scoreboard at Arena Birmingham read 21-13, 21-14. Chou Tien Chen of Chinese Taipei had no answer. With the final point, Axelsen became the first Danish man to win the All England Open since Peter Gade in 1999 — a wait of 21 years for a nation with deep badminton roots.
The 2020 edition carried a strange weight. As the coronavirus emptied arenas across world sport, the All England went ahead as one of the few tournaments still standing. Axelsen came through as the world number seven, and the harder road was behind him before the final began. In the semi-finals he trailed, dropped the opening game to Malaysia's Lee Zii Jia, then recovered to win 17-21, 21-13, 21-19.
"It was a really tough match. Lee made it really tough for me but I just tried to stay in there and do my best," Axelsen told reporters. "I managed to keep calm through to the end of the third game, but luck was also on my side as it could have gone either way."
The final asked less of him. Chou had reached it after his semi-final opponent, the Dane Anders Antonsen, retired with a twisted ankle. Across the net, Axelsen was measured and clean. He controlled the tempo, took the first game 21-13, and never let the second slip, closing at 21-14. There was no drama in the end, only command.
A step in the long climb
The result also settled a debt. Axelsen had reached the final in 2019 and lost to Kento Momota; a year on, he stood at the top of the podium. It was, at the time, the biggest win of his career, built on the foundation laid at the 2017 World Championships in Glasgow, where he beat Lin Dan to fulfil a boyhood ambition.
What followed only deepened the case that Birmingham was a turning point rather than a peak. Axelsen won Olympic gold at Tokyo in 2021, a second world title in 2022, the full set of BWF Super 1000 crowns in 2023, and a second Olympic gold in Paris in 2024. He would spend 183 weeks at world number one, the third-longest reign the men's game has known. The All England title sits early in that sequence, the moment a contender became a champion who did not stop.
In Birmingham, on a quiet afternoon, Denmark had its All England man again.
