The badminton World championships will begin here on Monday, with the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium already buzzing with activity as players sweated it out in their final practice sessions.

The tournament, which runs until August 23, marks the return of the event to India for the first time since 2009.

World No. 2 Wang Zhiyi said: “I feel like the drift… the weather, everything is very well maintained and very good as compared to last time.” She added that the focus over the last few days had been on training rather than obsessing over opponents.

Former Olympic champion Chen Yufei was still not fully fit after retiring injured against P.V. Sindhu at the Japan Open, allowing Sindhu to reach her first final in more than two years.

“It’s better than the last match but I think it’s not 100%,” she said.

Chen played down preparing for any one rival, saying she would focus on each match. That approach could be tested later in the tournament against An Se-young, with whom she has a 14-14 record dating back to 2018. Sindhu has also proved a particularly difficult opponent for Chinese players at the World championships.

Liang Weikeng and Wang Chang are still chasing their first crown, having won bronze in 2023. They spoke of the importance of playing together as a pair, saying they “motivate each other” and quickly move on after mistakes.

Their history with Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty makes the potential quarterfinal intriguing. The Liang-Wang duo had won four straight against them before the Indians finally won in Paris last year, only for the Chinese pair to respond with a win at the World Tour Finals.

On the practice courts, the intensity was evident. Sat-Chi sparred with M.R. Arjun and Hariharan Amsakarunan while Tanisha Crasto and Dhruv Kapila trained alongside Rohan Kapoor and Ruthvika Gadde. Sindhu and Ayush Shetty traded attacking exchanges, with coach Irwansyah Adi Pratama watching on.

The Chinese aura is diminishing.

For a formidable machine that churned out winners like clockwork and has had an incredible 72 champions, Shi Yuqi is the only one who will go into the upcoming badminton World championships looking to defend his title.

Shi’s win in Paris last year ended a 10-year barren streak, the previous winner being Chen Long in 2015.

Among the women, the drought has been much longer. Yihan Wang was the last Chinese to win the title way back in 2011. No wonder, most of the queries to the ones here revolved around the pressure of expectations.

“The players of China are very good and large in number. We don’t have pressure of performance as such; it is more about learning from each other and it benefits everyone,” World No. 9 Li Shifeng said on Saturday.

It’s a recurrent theme — the power of numbers, the insistence on lack of pressure and self-belief. But there is no denying the fact that the rest of the world has successfully ended the Chinese chokehold on the sport.

Consider this: China has three women in the top 10 but only two more in top 100. The men fare better, numerically; six in top 50 and eight in top 100.

Chen Yufei has come the closest to breaking the jinx, reaching the World championships finals in two of the last three editions but going down to Akane Yamaguchi both times, including last year. Her most recent outing, at the China Open, again ended in a straight games loss to Yamaguchi.

“I think it is more about ourselves, how we prepare. There is no pressure, only an expectation to do our best. You just need to have faith in yourself and not care about anything else. My biggest obstacle is myself and if I can conquer that, I believe I can win gold,” Yufei said about the missing title in her cabinet.

The red shirts on court are always intimidating. For now, though, the pressure is on them.