KUALA LUMPUR: What a fightback, what an escape. And what nerves. They shouldn't have won this match, but they did.
Aaron Chia-Soh Wooi Yik took Malaysian badminton fans on a roller coaster ride on Sunday, coming back from the dead to deliver Malaysia's first medal in Paris, on the 10th day of the Olympics.
Finally, Malaysia can sit with some pride on the medal board instead of appearing as zero zero zero.
In the men's doubles bronze medal playoff match, world No. 3 Aaron-Wooi Yik had gone down 16-21 to Denmark's world No. 2 Anders Skaarup Rasmussen-Kim Astrup in the first game.
And it looked like it was going to be a quick guillotine-like demise for the Malaysian duo when they were trailing 16-20 in the second.
But they just refused to surrender, and fought to hang on for dear life. Rasmussen-Astrup, who had also beaten Aaron-Wooi Yik in the Singapore Open in May, needed to land only one more blow for match point to kill off Aaron-Wooi Yik.
But somehow the Malaysian duo survived four match points, forced deuce and won the second game 22-20.
After they had been given a miraculous second life, Aaron-Wooi Yik did not waste it as they went on to press home to win the rubber 21-19 after a tense struggle.
"I never thought about losing. When the score was 20-16, I told Aaron that we gotta fight and not make any mistake. We told each other never to give up," said Wooi Yik in a post-match interview with BWF.
"When we got to 20-20, we believe that a miracle can happen. That was also when we started to believe we could win the second game."
Aaron said: "This is definitely our greatest comeback in a major tournament."
However, Aaron was in no mood to gloat over their amazing comeback. "For me, there's not much to celebrate as this is only bronze, we came to Paris to win gold. But at least we could get a medal for Malaysia and I'm proud of this achievement.
"In these past three years we grew and learned a lot, we also went through a lot, . becoming world champions and all.
"There are two sides to the coin, on one side you can say we didn't improve as we won bronze again. But on the other side, we showed consistency in contributing the same Olympic medal to Malaysia. It depends on how you look at it," philosophised the 27-year-old.
For 2022 world champions Aaron-Wooi Yik, it was their second consecutive Olympic bronze, as they also finished on the podium three years ago in Tokyo.
Their bronze on Sunday goes a long way in lifting the gloom of Lee Zii Jia's loss to Thailand's world champion Kunlavut Vitidsarn in the men's singles semi-final earlier in the day.