One Top Seed Won. France Won Two. And Both Our Dark Horses Took Titles.
Of the five top seeds who started the 2026 World Championships, exactly one won a title. France, which had never won a gold medal at these championships in its history, won two of them on the same afternoon.
The five champions
Discipline
Champion
Beat
Score
Men’s singles
Alex Lanier (FRA, 9)
Kodai Naraoka (JPN, 10)
21-11, 21-11
Women’s singles
An Se-young (KOR, 1)
Akane Yamaguchi (JPN, 2)
21-17, 21-14
Men’s doubles
Liang Weikeng / Wang Chang (CHN, 3)
Chia / Soh (MAS, 4)
21-17, 21-16
Women’s doubles
Baek Ha-na / Lee So-hee (KOR, 3)
Liu / Tan (CHN, 1)
21-15, 21-15
Mixed doubles
Gicquel / Delrue (FRA, 5)
Feng / Huang (CHN, 1)
22-20, 19-21, 21-15
Swipe through the five champions — and our scorecard.
Lanier did not make it close
A men’s singles world final between the ninth and tenth seeds was always going to be unusual. What nobody expected was for it to be over almost before it started. Alex Lanier beat Kodai Naraoka 21-11, 21-11 in fifty minutes — the kind of scoreline that turns up in a first round, not a world final.
It is worth remembering how that half of the draw got here. Shi Yuqi, the world number one and defending champion, went out in the first round to an unseeded Indian. Christo Popov went in the same round. Lakshya Sen lost to an 18-year-old ranked 92nd. Chou Tien-chen fell in the semi-finals. By the end, the two men left standing were seeded 9 and 10, and one of them won the title without dropping a game all afternoon.
France’s afternoon
Thom Gicquel and Delphine Delrue beat the world number ones, Feng Yanzhe and Huang Dongping, 22-20, 19-21, 21-15 to win the mixed doubles — France’s first gold medal in the history of these championships. Lanier then added a second within hours.
China, which arrived holding three of the five top seedings, left with a single gold: Liang Weikeng and Wang Chang in the men’s doubles.
An Se-young, alone
Among all five top seeds, only An Se-young converted. She beat Akane Yamaguchi in the women’s singles final for her second world title, having arrived carrying a foot injury that had kept her out of the Japan Open and the China Open, and having not won this title since 2023.
The women’s singles was the one discipline that ran exactly to seeding all week — 1 against 2 in the final — and it was the only one where the favourite finished the job.
The margin is worth looking at properly. An Se-young won 21-17, 21-14 — comfortable enough in games, but the two of them contested 73 points across the match and she took 42 of them to Yamaguchi’s 31. Eleven points in seventy-three. A final that reads as straightforward on the scoreline was, point for point, a good deal tighter than that.
Our predictions: nought from five
Nine days ago we published picks for all five titles. Here is the full reckoning, and it is not flattering in the way we expected.
Discipline
Our pick
Our dark horse
Champion
Men’s singles
Shi Yuqi ✗
Victor Lai ✗
Alex Lanier
Women’s singles
Yamaguchi ✗
PV Sindhu ✗
An Se-young
Men’s doubles
Fajar / Fikri ✗
Satwik / Chirag ✗
Liang / Wang
Women’s doubles
Liu / Tan ✗
Baek / Lee ✓
Baek Ha-na / Lee So-hee
Mixed doubles
Feng / Huang ✗
Gicquel / Delrue ✓
Gicquel / Delrue
Every single one of our five picks lost. Two of our five dark horses won the title.
That is not a coincidence, and it is worth being precise about why. Our picks were made the safe way — highest seed, best ranking, most recent form at the top of the sport. Our dark horses were made the other way, by looking for a specific reason a particular pair might beat the market: a draw that had lost two dangerous units, a pair with a decade of experience against opponents who had never been pushed. The reasoning that looked speculative turned out to be the reasoning that worked.
In women’s doubles we called Liu and Tan “the most confident call on the page”. They lost the final 21-15, 21-15 — to our own dark horse.
What India took home
One bronze, from Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand, who were unseeded and beat the 16th, 7th and 4th seeds in successive rounds before losing to the eventual finalists. It is India’s first women’s doubles medal at a World Championships since 2011, and it extends a run of medals at every edition since then.
The home tournament that began with Ayush Shetty knocking out the world number one ended with the medal coming from the pair almost nobody had written about.
The lesson the week kept repeating
A 21-year-old ranked 22nd beat the world number one. An 18-year-old ranked 92nd beat the 14th seed. An unseeded pair beat the 16th, 7th and 4th seeds in four days. Two pairs nobody fancied won world titles. A men’s final was contested by seeds 9 and 10 and settled 21-11, 21-11.
Seeding is an accounting of the last twelve months. It is a reasonable guide to who has been good and a poor guide to who is good right now — and across seven days in Delhi it was wrong more often than it was right. The only way to know what a player is capable of this week is to measure this week.
Common questions
Who won the 2026 BWF World Championships?
Alex Lanier (men’s singles), An Se-young (women’s singles), Liang Weikeng and Wang Chang (men’s doubles), Baek Ha-na and Lee So-hee (women’s doubles), and Thom Gicquel and Delphine Delrue (mixed doubles).
What was the men’s singles final score?
Alex Lanier beat Kodai Naraoka 21-11, 21-11 in 50 minutes — the ninth seed against the tenth.
Was this France’s first World Championships gold?
Yes. Gicquel and Delrue’s mixed doubles title was France’s first ever gold at these championships, and Lanier added a second on the same day.
Did India win a medal?
Yes — a bronze for Treesa Jolly and Gayatri Gopichand in women’s doubles, India’s first in that discipline since 2011.
How many top seeds won titles?
One. An Se-young in women’s singles was the only number one seed of the five to win.
