Joshna Chinappa and Velavan Senthilkumar secured India’s first squash medal in the 2026 Asian Games with a one-sided win over the Philippines in the quarter-final.
A win in the semi-final, to be played on Saturday (September 26) will see them punch their ticket for the gold medal match. Chinnappa and Senthilkumar defeated the Philippines’ David Pelino and Jemyca Aribado in a one-sided match which finished in under 30 minutes. The Indian duo registered a 11-3, 11-5 victory to open India’s medal tally in squash.
With this win, Chinappa has now guaranteed her a sixth Asian Games medal. A squash legend, Chinappa made her Asiad debut in 2002 and has featured in every quadrennial event since then. She is participating in a record-breaking seventh Asiad. No other Indian has featured in seven thus far.
India can add three more squash medals to their tally. Abhay Singh will be up against Japan’s Ryunosuke Tsukue in the quarter-final. A win there will assure India a second squash medal.
At 10:00 AM IST, Anahat Singh will face Tanvi Khanna in an all-Indian women’s quarter-final. Veer Chotrani will face Pakistan’s Muhammad Irrfan in the quarter-final from 10:45 AM IST.
Medal win very special: Joshna
Following the quarter-final, Chinappa said that the medal win is always very special. The 40-year-old revealed that she trained in the US before the Asiad. “Winning a medal for your country is always very special. And that’s been my motivation all my career. Well, I train abroad quite a bit. Like, I was in USA before the Asian Games. So I try to do it as much as I can. Otherwise, I train at the Indian Squash Academy in Chennai. I work with all the coaches there. And before the Asian Games, I was working with David Palmer in USA,” she told PTI.
“It was a very good match, we played aggressive from the start till the very end. We executed our plans perfectly and both of us played really well. We have not player our opponents earlier, so we watched the videos of the matches they had played earlier and made our strategy,” Senthilkumar, who is playing in his first Asian Games, told PTI.