Lakshya Sen Finally Won a Title Again. Why Is Staying on Top Harder Than Getting There?

Lakshya Sen won the Hylo Open final in 39 minutes. The route to it was a lot messier. He lost the opening game in three consecutive matches on the way there and had to recover each time.

On Sunday in Saarbrücken, Sen beat Indonesia’s Jonatan Christie 21-17, 21-10 to claim his first title of 2026. It ended a wait that stretched back to the Australian Open in November 2025, and it came on the same day PV Sindhu won the women’s singles without dropping a game.

A Christie problem he finally solved

Sen was seeded seventh and ranked 14th in the world. Christie was ranked sixth and was the defending champion. On paper that was an uphill final, and history wasn’t encouraging. At the 2024 All England, Sen led 17-4 in the second game of their semi-final and won it 21-10, but Christie took the deciding game and the match 15-21 in the third.

This time there was no third game. Sen won a close first game, then dominated the second, helped by a successful line-call review that earned him 10 match points. He needed just one of them. If you’re going to waste nine match points, it’s nice to have 10.

Beaten at the start, fine by the end

The story of the week was how often Sen lost the first game and still won the match. His five victories came against opponents ranked 59, 55, 67, 13 and six, and he trailed after the opening game in three of them. In one he lost the first game 16-21 and then won the next two 21-9 and 21-13.

That’s a different kind of consistency from the one we usually talk about. It isn’t playing perfectly every day. It’s having a way to recover when you’re not at your best, which is most days on the tour.

What a drought actually means

Eleven months without a title can look like a slump, but Sen’s year wasn’t empty. He’s still ranked 14th in the world, which means he’s regularly beating people and making rounds. The problem in a sport like badminton is that the gap between top-ten and top-twenty is smaller than the rankings suggest, and one bad draw or one tight third game can cost you a final.

That makes consistency tougher than winning once. A single title can come from a hot week. A run of titles requires a hot week every few months, against players who are all trying to peak at the same time.

The tournament that remembers him

Sen first won the Hylo Open in 2019, when it was a Super 100 event and he was still a teenager. This week’s win came at Super 500 level, with the tournament upgraded since, and he’s now a two-time champion at it. It’s a good place to remember what a player used to be, and what he’s still capable of.

There’s something satisfying about a win built on resilience rather than dominance. It suggests that a player who wins when he’s not at his best is well placed to win more often when he is.

He and Sindhu gave India a rare singles double, which will get most of the attention. For Sen, though, the more important detail is that he did it from behind, again and again, against opponents of rising quality.

Which is worth more to a sport: a player who wins a title every few months from outside the top ten, or a top-three player who is always in the last four but wins less often?