Kirsty Gilmour fails in gold bid after shocking top seed in semi-final

Scottish badminton star Kirsty Gilmour admits it feels “raw” after she could not hit the heights of Saturday’s semi-final performance yesterday and had to settle for a silver medal in the women’s singles at the European Games in Belarus.

Kirsty Gilmour could not repeat her form from the semi-final and went down in two sets to Denmarks Mia Blichfeld. Picture: PA

Two days ago Gilmour recovered from the loss of the first set to beat Danish top seed Line Hoemark Kjaersfeldt 13-21,21-16, 21-8 to get her through to the gold medal match.

That result gave her a shot at the final 24 hours later in Minsk, but she could not repeat the triumph and lost out to Denmark’s Mia Blichfeld, below, to finish second.

Yesterday she was always behind the 21-year-old, who improved on last year’s bronze with a 21-16, 21-17 victory.

“I’ll maybe be happy on the flight home, but now it is a bit raw,” 25-year-old Gilmour, the third seed, said after the match.

“It’s been a great week and just to be on the podium was a bare minimum expectation for me.

“My highlight of the tournament would be the second and third sets on Saturday against Line [Hoemark Kjaersfeldt] when I played some good stuff.

“I think I recognised what my problem was and I really turned it round and I played very well in that semi and I got a lot of confidence going into the final.

“I just couldn’t snatch it [the gold medal] away from Mia [Blichfeldt] – she played pretty well.”

With the World Championships coming up in Basel in Switzerland between 19-25 August the European Games marked the start of a busy competitive spell for Gilmour.

“After Minsk I have trips to Russia and Japan and then we have the Worlds and then Taipei and Vietnam so I really will be notching up the air miles,” the world No 27 who went to the Olympics in 2016 said. “It will be quite crazy, but you always want to test yourself against the best.

“In Minsk it was a tough competition, but I am feeling in a good place heading into the next few challenges now.

“I had a really good six or seven-week training block before Minsk and then I played in a test event in Spain and got a silver in the lead-up to the Games.

“In the recent training block it was really nice to work through the phases and really spend time on different parts of my game individually because sometimes you don’t have the luxury of doing that with coaches.”

Team GB headed home with an incredibly impressive five medals from a possible seven on offer at the Games in badminton, two of them gold, all of which will prove hugely beneficial in terms of ranking points on the road to Tokyo 2020.

As a result, double gold medallist Marcus Ellis was given the honour of being Team GB’s flagbearer at last night’s closing ceremony.

He secured gold in the men’s doubles on Saturday with Chris Langridge, before following it up yesterday with gold in the mixed doubles alongside Lauren Smith.

Ellis said: “What an unbelievable honour being chosen to be flagbearer – I never thought I’d be the one to be chosen to do something like this.”