Tokyo Olympics-bound shuttler B Sai Praneeth will not be travelling for Singapore Open after he withdrew from the tournament due to the quarantine requirements for Indians in Singapore. Indians will need to mandatorily quarantine for 21 says according to the new rules by Singapore and the flights directly from India have already been stopped. Praneeth does not want to lose touch with practice for so long and hence, he has decided to withdraw from the tournament and stay home and focus on preparing for the Olympics.
“It’s because we have to do 21 days quarantine and you can’t play even it is 14 days quarantine. Without practice it is very tough to play,” Praneeth said to Indian Express.
Praneeth has received the first dose of vaccine but cleared that won’t be enough to receive quarantine exemptions given the rising coronavirus cases in India. The country has been recording the highest number of cases in the world. “The vaccine status as of today can’t be used for travel or to seek exemptions for quarantine as an Indian,” he explained. “Maybe in the future, but I doubt it’ll help this early, he told.
Apart from Praneeth, the women’s doubles pair of Ashwini Ponnappa and N Sikki Reddy also pulled out of the tournament, which ended their slim hopes of qualifying for Tokyo 2020.
Telangana will be going under a lockdown for 10 days from May 12 onwards and Praneeth is planning to take a break for that time after going through rigorous training for the last few days. “I was preparing from a very long time for Malaysia and Singapore. But once it got cancelleded, I thought I’ll take a break and then start preparing for Olympics. I’ve already done 7 weeks of hard training so I thought I could take a break. The next 3 months will be tough non-stop and now that we aren’t travelling, we can train with focus.”
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