Zii Jia was not able to stop Kunlavut from winning the match 14-21, 15-21 in 43 minutes.
Kunlavut will now take on Viktor Axelsen in the final after the Dane defeated India’s Lakshya Sen 22-20, 21-14 in today’s other semi-final. Zii Jia will face Lakshya in a battle for bronze tomorrow.
Zii Jia was hoping to become the second Malaysian singles player to enter the final of the badminton competition at the Olympics.
Lee Chong Wei was the last Malaysian player to achieve this feat. The former world No 1 did this at three consecutive Games – Beijing (2008), London (2012) and Rio de Janeiro (2016). However, he lost on all three occasions and came home with the silver.
With this win, Kunlavut has now won five of his nine encounters with Zii Jia in international tournaments so far.
After taking a 3-0 lead in the first game, everything went downhill for Zii Jia, while Kunlavut appeared to get into top gear as the game went on.
After the Thai caught up to tie the score at 4-4, he worked his way to take an 11-9 lead at the break in just 11 minutes.
Kunlavut then quickly raced ahead to 15-11 and had a scare when he had to receive medical attention for a bruise on his right shin.
However, that did not stop him as he piled on the points with Zii Jia making many poor judgements at his baseline and hitting the shuttlecock out too often.
Kunlavut won the first game 21-14 in 21 minutes.
All hopes of Zii Jia making a comeback in the second game to force a rubber was gone with Kunlavut taking complete control. He was accurate with the placements and his shots hardly went out.
Displaying accurate net play and quick kills, he raced to a 10-3 lead in just six minutes.
Again, everything went against Zii Jia as he kept hitting the shuttlecock out at his opponent’s baseline, with Kunlavut returning all that the Malaysian threw at him. He took just eight minutes to lead 11-5 at the break.
Zii Jia tried to make a comeback after the breather but it was too feeble as Kunlavut returned almost all his smashes with ease.
He went on to take the second game 21-15 in 22 minutes and dashed Malaysia’s dream of an Olympic final appearance.
Paris 2024 is an improvement for Zii Jia though as he lost to China’s Chen Long in the last-16 stage when making his debut at the 2020 Tokyo Games.
Meanwhile, this is the second successive Olympic Games with no Malaysian finalists in badminton, compared with the 2016 Rio Olympics, when Malaysia had three finalists.
In Paris 2024, Malaysia had three representatives in the semi-finals.
The other two were men’s doubles pair Aaron Chia-Soh Wooi Yik, who lost to top seeds Liang Wei Keng-Wang Chang of China, and women’s doubles pair Pearly Tan-M Thinaah, who went down to Chen Qing Chen-Jia Yi Fan, another Chinese top pair.