In the men’s doubles Holland has 2 participating pairs in London: Ruud Bosch and his partner Koen Ridder and Dave Khodabux and myself.
Ruud and Koen have a good draw. In the first round they meet the Americans Vincent Nguy and Sameera Gunatileka who are relatively unknown in the circuit but still the numbers 57 on the world ranking. Most of the tournaments they play are in North and South America and don’t offer much high level competition. It was with these tournaments that they gathered their points. Our countrymen are 29 points better in ranking and one may expect an easy win. In the second round they will be confronted with the 9th seeded Japanese Hashimoto and Hirata. No doubt this is going to be a tough match but our men are not without chances. They have shown before to be able to stunt. In March during the Swiss open they managed to defeat the All England winners Boe and Mogensen and in May they reached the semi finals of the Grand Prix Gold Tournament of Malaysia. It is going to be an interesting week for this men’s pair which is trying to qualify for the Games in London next year.
As I wrote before Dave and I have a very bad draw. In the first round we will be confronted with the Chinese Hong Wei and Shen Ye. These men from the elite team of Li Yongbo are the number 27 of the world and at the recent Super series of Singapore they reached the quarter finals. So far Dave and I have a positive balance in matches against Chinese and we would like to keep it that way but it is for sure that we are the underdog. If we would manage to win the prospects are again not very favourable because the next opponents would be the Indonesians Kido and Setiawan who were the gold medallists in Beijing.