Viktor Axelsen, the most decorated Olympic singles badminton player with two golds and one bronze, is retiring at age 32 due to back pain that kept him from pursuing an unprecedented third consecutive Olympic title at the LA28 Games.
Denmark’s Axelsen cited nerve pain — and back problems dating back to before he repeated as Olympic gold medalist in Paris, followed by surgery in April 2025 — that recently kept him from “even simple training on court.”
“My medical team has advised me that getting back with how my back is looking, it’s not looking good, because the next step would be to go in for a bigger surgery and fixate the lower back because my back is basically not stable enough that I would be able to compete at the highest level, so basically it’s not because I want to retire,” he said on The Average Not Average podcast. “It’s simply because I’m not able to do the training required, but it is very tough for me not to be able to say stop or have one last dance, but that’s just how my story is, I guess.”
Axelsen and China’s Lin Dan and Zhang Ning are the only players to win multiple Olympic singles titles since badminton became an Olympic medal sport in 1992.
Axelsen beat Lin in the bronze-medal match in 2016, after which the Dane went viral in China for giving an interview in Mandarin to Chinese TV.
Axelsen then snapped China’s streak at three Olympic men’s singles golds by winning in Tokyo and then Paris. He was the only badminton player from a country outside of Asia to win a medal at either Games.
Axelsen became the second athlete from Denmark to win multiple individual Olympic golds after Paul Elvstrøm, who won sailing titles in 1948, 1952, 1956 and 1960.
Axelsen, a father of two daughters, also won world titles in 2017 and 2022.
“I feel extremely, to be honest, blessed and happy that I’ve been able to do what I love for so many years and won everything I wanted to win and, most importantly of all, meet so many extremely good people,” he said.
