Three years ago, at Tokyo 2020, Maiken Fruergaard and Sara Thygesen had created one of the big upsets of the group stages beating fourth seeds Lee So Hee/Shin Seung Chan. Today Lee must have felt a sense of déjà vu as she and current partner Baek Ha Na – among the favourites for the title – fell to the Danes in their Group D encounter at Paris 2024.

The Koreans appeared to have gained the upper hand by taking the second game comfortably, before unexpectedly wilting in the third, 21-18 9-21 21-14. With three titles this season, Lee and Baek were among the favourites for the gold, but their performance today will give them plenty to think about for their remaining group matches.

“We had some good weeks of practice, and I think we found out some stuff (about them); we knew them already, but we didn’t trust enough, and I think we did that today and it gave us a lot of confidence and a lot of initiative in the rallies,” said Fruergaard.

“The crowd gave us a lot of good energy. Today it helped me, sometimes it doesn’t. We knew our family would try to cheer us up out there, we could hear them and that gave us a lot of energy on court to get a bit more movement.”

Thygesen said the key in the third game was to get moving once again.

“They got going in the second game, they did make as many mistakes and we weren’t moving as fast as in the first game. We just had to get moving again in the third game. And trust what we saw on court, especially in the serve situations.”

Despite the win, the Danes chose to be circumspect about their chances against their other groupmates Jongkolphan Kititharakul/Rawinda Prajongjai and Anne Tran/Margot Lambert.

Easy for Lee/Wang

Among the high-profile contests of the day was reigning champions Lee Yang/Wang Chi-Lin against 2021 world champions Takuro Hoki/Yugo Kobayashi.

The match was expected to go down the wire, but Lee/Wang blew apart their opponents in just 34 minutes, 21-16 21-10, to begin their Olympic campaign on a more positive note than they had in Tokyo 2020, where they had lost their opening match.

→ Results (Day 1)

→ Order of play (Day 2)