Autumnal evenings don’t get more melancholy than the finality of the realisation that Tai Tzu-ying will never play a competitive badminton match again. Autumnal evenings don’t get merrier than knowing with certainty that no matter how abruptly it ends, we lived to witness the fairytale era when Tai Tzu-ying played badminton, watching the shuttle do tricks in a starry sky.

On Friday, the Taiwanese officially confirmed her retirement which had been on the cards for a while. “A beautiful chapter has come to an end. Thank you badminton for everything you have given me,” she wrote. Like a safe-haven asset in times of uncertain equity markets, Tai Tzu-ying’s two silvers – at Tokyo Olympics and the 2021 Worlds – could be pegged as her peaks.

But the mesmerising shuttler needed neither the Olymp

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