This time last year, England’s badminton pairing Chris and Gabby Adcock had bigger things on their mind than a Commonwealth Games final. The young sweethearts were preparing for their wedding, not to mention a honeymoon to Las Vegas and Hawaii. On Sunday, they were celebrating their upcoming one-year anniversary with their first gold medal together.
England had been guaranteed gold and silver the moment their opponents, Chris Langridge and Heather Olver, won the second semi-final to set up an all-English final. But the Adcocks, who have not dropped a game throughout their campaign, pulled no punches against their friends and team-mates, winning 21-9, 21-12. “We were very very disciplined in what we needed to do,” Chris said afterwards. “We stuck to our game plan and kept calm … we said to each other before the match we really want to enjoy it.” Would it do for an anniversary present? “Definitely,” said Gabby. Her husband replied diplomatically: “Thanks for reminding me.”
It has been an emotional and exhausting fortnight for both of them. Saturday Gabby was nervously watching her husband miss out on a bronze-medal in the men’s doubles competition – “Obviously I want him to win all the time, and I felt a bit sorry for him” – and in the evening she and her other partner, Lauren Smith, won women’s doubles bronze in a tense match that went on late into the night. “I was watching Gabby’s game thinking I hope she’s got some legs left after that,” Chris admitted. Gabby laughed. “He was texting me saying have you eaten food, you promise me you’ve eaten, are you going to have a banana?”
The No1 seeds here – they are ranked fifth in the world – their match against the world No20s was lively, if not evenly matched. Instructions were barked in threes: “Yes, yes, yes!” “No, no, no!” “Out, out, out!”. Gabby was impassable at the net, her husband hanging back to issue his smash like an imperious smackdown. They kept their older opponents constantly on the defensive, and targeted Olver mercilessly.
Langridge and Olver’s best point of the match came in the second game, a 36-stroke rally and a masterpiece of defence, and there was a brief reprieve to the Adcock onslaught at 8-18 when one of Chris’s Hulk smashes landed out. Langridge and Olver strung together a four-point run, and at 12-19 Olver clipped the shuttlecock over the net with a beautifully drifted backhand that Gabby Adcock acknowledged with a thumbs up. But she faulted on her next serve to give the opposition eight match points. They needed only one; their victory hug was somewhat longer than you usually see between team-mates.
It has been a sensational return to form for the Adcocks, whose coaches split them up before the 2012 Olympics to play with more experienced partners. They resumed their partnership after Imogen Bankier left the training setup to compete for Scotland, and made short work of Bankier and her new partner to secure their place in the final. What makes them work so well together? “Chris’s angles of attack are just phenomenal and I think I’m good at keeping the lift for him to get that attack,” said Gabby. “Being one of the quickest pairs in the world, that really benefits us too.”
In the match that followed, Kirsty Gilmour made history the moment she entered the arena, as the first Scottish player to appear in a badminton singles final. But it was Canada’s Michelle Li who earned her country’s first Commonwealth singles gold in their encounter. It took her only 38 minutes to do so, but Gilmour had looked beaten long before. The crowd, which had begun the match chanting “Scotland!” seemed to have read the runes by the first interval, and soon a single seven-person row of Canadian supporters were making more noise than the remaining 6,000 fans.
Gilmour did play a couple of exquisite shots. At 10-18 in the first, a disguised backhand dropshot set up her most fluid forehand of the match, and a couple of points later she unveiled a hitherto unseen backhand smash. The match’s longest rally came at 0-3 in the second match, she and Li stretching each other at the back of the court, then teasing each across the net. But Gilmour lost the point and with it, it seemed, her nerve.
For the Adcocks, however, it was time to celebrate. They were the second England husband and wife team to win gold in only 24 hours, after Paul and Joanna Drinkhall’s triumph in the table tennis mixed doubles – perhaps the LTA want to consider incorporating marriage as part of their training strategy – and they were already making domestic plans. The first thing they wanted to do, said Adcock, was see their dog Bowser, a fluffy white Maltese. “We’ve missed him like crazy,” said Chris. “We’ll see if we’ve got the energy to go to the closing spectacle. And we’ll have a couple of days really enjoying what we’ve achieved.” “We’ll both sleep well tonight, that’s for sure,” said Gabby.
