A long Danish partnership

Brondby is a suburb on the western edge of Copenhagen. Its national badminton centre is a low brick building with a green roof and a car park that fills up around four in the afternoon, when the squads come in from school. For the best part of a decade, two men spent most of their evenings in there together. One was the head coach of Denmark. The other was the tallest player in world badminton, and quietly, for stretches of those years, the best.

Kenneth Jonassen was born in 1974, in Herning, a small town on the Jutland peninsula where Danish badminton has always been disproportionately strong. He came up as a singles player in a generation that produced Peter Gade, and spent most of his career in Gade's shadow. Big for a singles player, hard to move, harder to wear down, he reached the world's leading group of singles players. In 2004 he played at the Olympics in Athens. Across seven Thomas Cup campaigns he carried Denmark deep into the rounds. He never won the world title that some of his contemporaries did. When he retired, he stayed in the sport, and the sport kept him.

The teenager from Odense

Viktor Axelsen grew up in Odense, the third largest city in Denmark, on the island of Funen. He was already taller than most of the adults at his club by the time he was fifteen. Six foot four. Long arms, long legs. Coaches do not often get to work with that kind of frame, because by the time a child grows that tall they have usually drifted to basketball or volleyball or stopped showing up. Axelsen kept showing up.

In 2010, at sixteen, he had won the World Junior Championships in Guadalajara, the first European to do so. Four years later he was inside the senior elite on the world tour. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, on a hot August evening in the Riocentro hall, he beat Lin Dan, the greatest singles player of the modern era, in three close games to take the bronze medal. The next morning the Danish papers ran the photograph of him standing on the podium, head tilted slightly, looking like someone trying to work out what had happened to his life.

The man behind the bench

Throughout those years, the man on the chair behind the court was Jonassen. He had taken over as Denmark's singles head coach, and Axelsen was his project. From the outside, the partnership did not look like a fairy tale. It looked like ordinary, repeated, careful work. Any honest coach would recognise the shape of it. The video review the morning after a loss. A footwork drill that gets boring before it gets useful. The session you almost cancel because the player is tired, and you run anyway because the next tournament is on Sunday.

What Jonassen brought to it was not theatre. He had been the player who lost the close ones to better Danes, and he had stayed in the sport because he loved it. That gave him a kind of patience that is hard to fake. Knowing what it felt like to be the second name on the team sheet, he also knew, from his own playing years, the thin line between the player who reaches the final and the player who does not. He coached Axelsen as if both versions were possible at any moment, which is the honest truth of any career at that level.

Tokyo

The Tokyo Olympics arrived a year late, in the summer of 2021, into a half empty Musashino Forest Sport Plaza with no spectators. Axelsen went through the draw without dropping a game. In the semi-final he beat Anders Antonsen, his close friend and the other Danish singles player on the team, in three. In the final, on 2 August, he played Chen Long, the Chinese veteran and reigning Olympic champion. Axelsen won 21 to 15 and 21 to 12. When the final point landed he dropped his racket, sat down on the court, and put his hands over his face. The first thing the cameras caught after that was the long walk to the side of the court where Jonassen was waiting. They held on to each other for a long time, neither of them saying anything you could lip-read.

In the interviews afterwards, Jonassen said the same thing in three different ways. He called Axelsen the most professional athlete he had ever worked with. Training someone who wanted to improve every day was, in his words, the easiest hard job in the sport. And he felt incredibly privileged. He used that word in Danish more than once. Privilegeret.

The Dubai years

Less than a month later, Axelsen announced he was moving his training base to Dubai. The reasons were practical and personal. Year round heat, a quiet city to live in, a young family, the chance to design his own training environment with hand-picked sparring partners flown in from across Asia. The unintended cost was that Jonassen, as the head coach of a national programme based in Copenhagen, could not follow him there to every tournament. Badminton Danmark made a quiet announcement. The daily coaching would now be done by Axelsen and his own team in Dubai. Jonassen would still be there for the big championships when the schedule allowed.

Other arrangements like this have hardened into something colder. A national coach who feels gently used. A star player who feels gently judged. What is worth noticing is that this one did not. Both men kept describing the relationship in public the same way they had in private. Axelsen kept thanking Jonassen by name from podiums. Jonassen kept turning up when the tournaments mattered most.

In the spring of 2024, with the Paris Games coming up, Badminton Danmark sent Jonassen back out on the road. He sat behind the bench at the Indonesia Open and the Canada Open with Axelsen and Antonsen, as if the previous three years had only been a pause. By the time the Olympic squad flew to Paris in July, the old chair was occupied again.

Paris

Axelsen had not had his best year. There had been an ankle injury and a quiet patch on the tour. Going into the Games he was no longer the obvious favourite. He played his way through the group, then the knockouts, then a semi-final against Lee Zii Jia of Malaysia, the player Jonassen would later be hired to coach. On 5 August 2024, in the Porte de la Chapelle Arena in northern Paris, Axelsen faced Kunlavut Vitidsarn of Thailand in the men's singles final.

The match lasted a little over an hour. Axelsen won the first game, lost the second narrowly, and then took the third decisively. When the final shuttle landed on the back line he did not drop to the floor this time. He turned and walked, almost calmly, to where Jonassen was standing. Two Olympic golds. Three Olympic medals across three Games. The same coach behind the chair for all of them.

What a long partnership looks like

A few months after Paris, Jonassen left the Danish job to become the singles head coach of Malaysia, a country with its own deep badminton history and a generation of players coming through. Axelsen, meanwhile, began a new partnership at home with Peter Gade, the great Danish player Jonassen had spent his own career chasing. The circle closed in a way that only a small sport like badminton could arrange.

What is easy to miss, from the outside, is how rare a coaching partnership of that length is in elite individual sport. Most players change coaches every two or three years. The standard reasons are real ones. Plateau. Bad camp. A clash about training load or travel or money. Axelsen and Jonassen had all of those pressures and worked through them. What they had instead of a clean fairy tale was something more useful. One long, honest record of work done together. Sessions logged. Tournaments reviewed. Quiet conversations after defeats that did not turn into recriminations. That kind of relationship does not show up in a highlights reel, but it shows up, eventually, in the medal table.

Somewhere in the Brondby hall this week, on a quiet evening, a fifteen year old is hitting clears against a coach who used to be a player. Most of them will not become Olympic champions. The ones who do, almost always, can name the coach who stayed.