Syed Modi International: Young shuttlers Unnati, Priyanshu to play second round of singles competition

Hooda defeated Aakarshi Kashyap by 15-21, 21-19, 21-18 in a hard-fought round of 32 match on Wednesday and could be facing former world champion Nozomi Okuhara of Japan on Thursday, as per Olympics.com.

Anupama Upadhyaya, Ashmita Chaliha, Ruthvika Shivani and Janani Ananthakumar advanced to the next round of the women's singles competition.

Priyanshu on the other hand, beat Kazakhstan's Dimitry Panarin 21-17, 21-19 to reach the pre-quarters stage.

In men's singles, Kiran George, who beat Chirag Sen by 21-16, 14-21, 21-13 and Sathish Kumar, who beat Taiwan's Huang Yu Kai by 21-8, 21-13, also emerged as India's success stories on day one.

Other men's singles players like Sameer Verma, Mithun Manjunath and B Sai Praneeth failed to advance to the next round.

Another big player who crashed out in the first round besides former world championships medalist was Kidambi Srikanth.

Srikanth continued his poor run of form, losing to world number 36 Chia Hao Lee of Taiwan 23-21, 2-8 for his fourth straight first-round exit on the Badminton World Federation (BWF) Tour.

Praneeth also lost to 12th-ranked Japanese shuttler Kenta Nishimoto 21-17, 21-15.

Men's doubles pairs of Dhruv Rawat-Chirag Sen, Ayush Makhija-Venkat Gaurav Prasad and Hariharan Amsakarunan-Ruban Kumar Rethinasabapath moved to the second round.

Also, the women's doubles duo of Ashwini Ponnappa-Tanisha Crasto and Commonwealth Games medalists Gayatri Gopichand-Treesa Jolly reached the second round.

Ponnappa-Crasto defeated Samriddhi Singh and Sonali Singh 21-8, 21-9 to make progress while Gayatri Gopichand-Treesa Jolly beat Apoorva Gahlawat and Sakshi Gahlawat 21-9, 21-16.

Among other women's doubles pairs in pre-quarters round are Simran Singhi-Ritika Thaker, Rutuparna Panda-Swetaparna Panda, Ashwini Bhat K-Shikha Gautam and Akshit Mahajan-Ridhi Kaur Toor.

In the mixed doubles event, Nitin Kumar-N Manglam along with BS Reddy-N Sikki Reddy and Ashwini Ponnappa-Rohan Kapoor moved to the next round of mixed doubles on Wednesday.

The Syed Modi India International is a BWF Super 300 event and its results will count towards players' qualifying rankings for the 2024 Paris Olympics. (ANI)