Viktor Axelsen won gold at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paris 2024 Olympics, as well as winning the World Championships twice (in 2017 and 2022) and being ranked number 1 in the world for an impressive 183 weeks.
Viktor was also awarded the Player of the Year in 2022 by the Badminton World Federation (BWF) and the Danish Sports Name of the Year in 2017 and 2022 by the National Olympic Committee and Sports Confederation of Denmark and Team Danmark.
Viktor was the best badminton player in the world for, in our opinion, 5 reasons: his attack; his shot selection; his consistency; his movement and physicality; and autonomy.
So after analysing over 30 hours of his matches, we’ll now break down each of these 5 areas that made Viktor the best in the game (at the time of writing), as well as what we can all learn from Viktor to implement into our own game!
💡Did you know: In 10 of Viktor’s matches against various players ranked in the top 10 in the world, 36% of his points came from hitting winning shots with his rear court attack! That’s over 1 in every 3 points!
When comparing this to 10 matches from other top players: Lee Zii Jia (who is known for his attack) won 28% of his points with his attack, and Anthony Ginting only won 24% of his points with his attack.
His height can be seen as a huge advantage, as Viktor Axelsen is 1.94cm (or 6ft 4 in). This allowed him to get a lot of angle on his overhead shots!
But why else was Viktor’s attack so good?
🏸 What You Can Implement In Your Game: Try to have the same preparation for all your shots in a specific area (e.g. overhead rear court shots), and focus on having variety and accuracy in your shots rather than only power.
Viktor often chose shots that forced his opponent to lift.
Example 1: In the forecourt, he played a lot of pushes to the service line.
But why is this good?
Example 2: He made his opponents move in a long diagonal (the longest distance on the court).
Example 3: He often lifted when returning a low serve.
🏸 What You Can Implement In Your Game: Try one (or all) of the examples above, and see if they can help you in your training and matches!
💡 In one of his matches against Kento Momota (world number 2 at the time of the match at the Malaysia Open 2022), Viktor won 21-4, 21-7, and only made 4 unforced errors!
You might think this was just a one-off, however he also beat other players in the top 10 in the world to a similar score line, making an average of only 9 unforced errors in these matches.
This is VERY impressive given he was playing the best players in the world where the margins are so small.
Because Viktor rarely made any unforced errors, this made his opponents feel like they need to hit more accurately and go for winners, which actually then makes them more likely to make unforced errors – a concept that works at all levels!
What You Can Implement In Your Game: Reduce your unforced errors by making intentional shot decisions and choosing to play certain shots at the right time. This might sometimes mean playing ‘safer’ shots instead of trying to hit ‘perfect’ shots, or ‘winning shots’ the whole time.
We all know that badminton is a physical sport – you need speed, strength, power, endurance and agility. Comparing his physique from his younger self, Viktor definitely worked hard to build all of these over the years.
One way he did this was by working hard in the gym, and if you’d like more information on weights training for badminton players, you can check out our programmes below:
Get 12 badminton-specific weights programmes designed to help you improve your strength, endurance, speed and explosive power.
🏸 What You Can Implement In Your Game: Regularly practice your footwork and work on your physicality. Know that it's possible to transform your physique for the better, just like Viktor did (with a lot of time and hard work)!
Of course, there were faster players on the World Tour than Viktor (such as Anthony Ginting or Loh Kean Yew), but considering the size of Viktor, his ability to move fast and recover fast was extremely impressive.
He also moved very efficiently around the court, which helped him to get to the shuttle earlier whilst also saving energy!
Download the free Badminton Footwork Tests PDF with 4 tests to measure your footwork speed, efficiency and explosiveness.
Then, over the next 6 days, we’ll send you some of our best footwork tips to help you move faster and more explosively.
Autonomy is defined as ‘freedom from external influence or control’.
Not many top level badminton players have this, but Viktor did after becoming an independent player and moving his entire training set up to Dubai after the Tokyo Olympics. This has enabled him to do exactly what he wanted to do, and this control both on and off the court throughout his whole career definitely seemed to help his performance.
Moving away from a controlled training environment might not be the best choice for everyone, but Viktor was extremely professional with everything he did.
A lot of people think that to become the best in the world, you need to be thinking about badminton every second of the day, however we strongly disagree!
Whilst playing, Viktor learnt Chinese, had his own brand (VAHealth), a YouTube channel, and also 2 daughters – things he often said helped take his mind off the sheer relentlessness of sport.
🏸 What You Can Implement: Have other projects or things in your life to help take your mind off the highs and lows of competitive sport. This can give you more autonomy and purpose in your life, which can in turn positively impact your performance on court.
Here are 3 more quick tips that we’ve learnt from watching Viktor for many years:
1. Train with intensity and purpose. A big reason for Viktor’s success was his relentless pursuit of excellence within everything he did – whether he was doing shot practice, training routines or playing matches.
2. Invest in yourself. Whether this is trying to improve your diet, learning how to improve your sleep, or how to train better, these 1% differences can compound and result in huge changes over time.
💡 James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits famously said: “If you get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37 times better by the time you’re done.” You can read more about it here!
3. Have fun in training! This is something that Viktor has talked about a lot and is something we are also big advocates of!
If you’d like to improve your footwork or start doing badminton specific weights training, then you can do so by clicking here.