Indian badminton star Lakshya Sen created history on Friday night, August 2. He entered the semi-finals of the Paris Olympics 2024 by defeating Chinese Taipei badminton star Chou Tien Chen in a thrilling three-game match. He became the first Indian male shuttler to achieve this feat, but did you know that the player whom Lakshya Sen defeated was suffering from cancer till some time ago? Chou Tien Chen had hidden this thing from his fans for a long time and revealed it just before the Olympics.
Chou Tien Chen won the first match against Lakshya Sen 21-19, but Lakshya won the next two games and entered the semi-finals. Chou Tien Chen showed aggression in this match, but he was not successful. However, after what happened to the Chinese Taipei shuttler last year, it seemed that he would probably never return to the badminton court. Tien Chen was battling early stage colorectal cancer last year. He had to undergo surgery for this and eventually it saved his life. He made it to the Paris Olympics by working hard.
“I wouldn’t be standing here if I didn’t know,” Chou Tien Chen, a bronze medallist at the Tokyo Olympics, said during the BWF Madrid Spain Masters 2024. He believes that it’s a good thing if someone finds out about it early. In early 2023, Chou Tien Chen took advantage of the break between tournaments to undergo a comprehensive physical examination. The examination revealed that he had a very high risk of developing cancer. Despite initial recommendations to wait a year, Chou sought a second opinion, which confirmed his cancer and was followed by surgery to remove cancer cells from his colon.
“They checked for cancer and said it was high-risk. They said I could probably come back after a year. I said I’ll think about it. It’s really weird, because I did a health checkup, thinking maybe I had cancer or something that I could cut out early, but they said, ‘You just wait a year.’ I thought it was weird, so I changed hospitals and checked again and they found cancer and did surgery. I returned to the court after just a few months,” Chou said.
