On Friday, January 23, 2026, India lost its chance to make it to the semi-finals of the 2026 Indonesia Masters Super 500 after PV Sindhu and Lakshya Sen suffered exits in the quarter-finals. Both top players face a straight loss in their respective women’s and men’s singles matches held in Jakarta. Sindhu and Lakshya were the lone contenders of the country in the tournament, that too in the singles event only. India did not participate in the men’s and women’s doubles or the mixed doubles.
In the women’s singles match, double Olympic medallist Sindhu lost her quarterfinal match to World No. 4 Chen Yu Fei of China by sets of 13-21, 17-21. After losing the opening set, the Indian ace shuttler had a 12-11 lead in the second set, but a misconduct against the umpire ended up with a yellow card. Soon enough, Chen, using the opportunity, took the lead at 16-12 while Sindhu lost her momentum and ended up losing the semi-finals spot.
With the loss, Sindhu, the 2019 world champion, now trails Tokyo Olympic champion by 6-8 in the head-to-head record. The two last clashed in the 2022 Thailand Open, in which Sindhu lost her semi-finals to the Chinese shuttler in straight games by sets of 21-17, 21-16. Her last win over Fei was in 2019.
Earlier in the Round of 16, Sindhu defeated Denmark’s Line Kjaersfeldt to record her 500th career win in the women’s singles category. With 516 wins, she is now the sixth player from across the world to hold this record, including Ratchanok Intanon (576), Tai Tzu Ying (570), Akane Yamaguchi (532), Carolina Marin (526), and Petya Nedelcheva.
Meanwhile, in the men’s singles event, World Championship bronze medallist Sen was defeated by World No. 44 Panitchaphon Teeraratsakul of Thailand in sets of 18-21, 20-22. It was a close contest that lasted for 46-minutes. This was Sen’s second consecutive loss in a quarter-final match suffered in last week’s loss during the 2026 India Open Super 750.
Previously, on Thursday, January 22, India lost its another set of contenders in the singles category after Kidambi Srikanth and Anmol Kharb lost their men’s and women’s matches respectively. Srikanth got defeated by Chinese Taipei’s Chou Tien Chen by sets of 11-21, 10-21, while Kharb faced her loss to former world champion Nozomi Okuhara of Japan by 14-21, 11-21. Meanwhile, the Indian pair of Hariharan Amsakarunan and M.R. Arjun lost their men’s doubles match in the pre-quarterfinals.
