The fastest badminton smashes ever recorded

The fastest badminton smash ever recorded is 565 km/h (351 mph), hit by India's Satwiksairaj Rankireddy on 14 April 2023 and certified by Guinness World Records. The women's record, set the same day, is 438 km/h (272 mph) by Malaysia's Tan Pearly. Both were test-condition hits, not rallies: in a match, the fastest smash Guinness lists is 426 km/h (265 mph) by Denmark's Mads Pieler Kolding in 2017.

Those numbers make badminton the fastest racket sport on the planet, at least for the first few centimeters. A shuttlecock is also the worst projectile in sport at keeping its speed, which is the more interesting half of the story. Below: every record and the conditions behind it, how speeds are measured, and two interactive models that show how fast a 500 km/h smash stops being a 500 km/h smash.

Badminton smash speed world records

"Fastest smash" gets used for three different things, and most arguments online come from mixing them up. Here they are, separated.

Sources: Guinness World Records listings for "Fastest badminton hit (male)", "Fastest badminton hit (female)" and "Fastest badminton hit in competition (male)". Satwik's 565 km/h beat the previous Guinness title of 493 km/h, set in 2013, by 72 km/h.

The 565 km/h record: what actually happened

Satwik and Tan Pearly set their marks in the gymnasium of Yonex's factory in Soka, Saitama, with Guinness adjudicators verifying the results. Both used the same racket model. These were controlled attempts: a fresh player, as many swings as allowed, and the measurement taken immediately after impact, when the shuttle is at its fastest. Satwik received his certificate during the 2023 Japan Open. Tan Pearly became the first woman to hold the Guinness title in the category.

The fastest badminton smash in a match

In-match smashes are harder to hit at full power (you are moving, the lift isn't perfect, the opponent is waiting) and harder to measure fairly. Guinness credits Lee Chong Wei with 408 km/h at the 2015 Hong Kong Open, later passed by Mads Pieler Kolding's 426 km/h in the Premier Badminton League in Bangalore in January 2017.

Tournament broadcasts now show speed readouts on screen, and some have gone higher still: Satwik was widely reported at 500 km/h during the 2023 Korea Open quarterfinal, and reports of a BWF social post put Lee Zii Jia at 497.1 km/h at the 2024 Malaysia Masters. Treat those as broadcast readings rather than certified records: they were not ratified by Guinness, and different systems measure in different ways.

How a smash speed record is measured

For the 2023 records, reports from the event describe an ultra-high-speed camera capturing 40,000 frames per second filming the shuttle just after it left the strings. At that frame rate a 565 km/h shuttle moves under 4 mm between frames, so the distance it covers over a handful of frames, divided by the time between them, gives a very precise release speed.

Three details matter more than the gear:

• Initial speed, not average speed. Every record is the speed in the first instant after contact. The shuttle is never that fast again.
• Measured along the real flight path. A camera filming at an angle, or a radar gun off to the side, under-reads. The fix is geometry, which we cover in how to measure smash speed with a phone.
• Test vs match. A feeder can serve up the perfect lift fifty times; a match gives you one chance at whatever arrives.

Research setups vary too. In one study of 77 French players, Phomsoupha and Laffaye (2014) used a Doppler radar gun sampling at 250 Hz from behind the player and found speeds from 24 to 82 m/s (about 88 to 294 km/h) across skill levels. Different method, different number, which is why you should compare like with like. More on typical speeds in how fast is a normal smash.

Badminton vs the fastest objects in other sports

At release, the record smash beats every ball on this list. Tap 10 m race to see what happens next.

On top speed the shuttle wins easily: 565 km/h against 378 km/h for the fastest golf drive in the Guinness books (Thomas Fliniks, 2026) and 263 km/h for the fastest tennis serve (Sam Groth, 2012). But run the same objects over 10 m and the order flips. In our simplified model the record smash needs about 213 ms to cover 10 m, almost exactly as long as Aroldis Chapman's record 105.8 mph (170 km/h) fastball, which takes about 211 ms. The golf ball gets there in under 100 ms.

Why the shuttle slows down so fast

A shuttle weighs only 4.74 to 5.50 g under the BWF Laws of Badminton, but its skirt of 16 feathers presents a big, open cone to the air. Air drag grows with the square of speed, so at 500 km/h the drag force is enormous compared with the shuttle's tiny mass. Physicists call this the shuttle's "aerodynamic wall": hit it twice as hard and it does not go anywhere near twice as far.

• Terminal velocity is only about 6.7 m/s (24 km/h). That is the speed a dropped shuttle settles at, measured by Darbois Texier, Cohen, Quéré and Clanet (New Journal of Physics, 2014). A tennis ball falls far faster.
• Speed halves about every 3.35 m. High-speed video of elite smashes analysed by Collet (2026) shows the velocity decaying exponentially with distance.
• Half the speed is gone in roughly 0.05 s. In the radar study above, a typical smash had lost half its speed in about 0.05 s and four-fifths after 0.25 s.

Slide the numbers yourself. The dashed line marks the net for a smash hit from about a meter inside your own baseline.

Under this model, Satwik's 565 km/h smash is down to roughly 175 km/h by the time it crosses the net and around 70 km/h after 10 m. That is still very fast for a defender standing six meters away, because the shuttle covers those first few meters in a few hundredths of a second. It also explains why a smash steep and close to the net is more dangerous than a flat one from the baseline: less distance, less drag.

Why the records keep rising

The men's test record went from 493 km/h in 2013 to 565 km/h in 2023, a 15% jump in a decade. Both test records were set in sessions organised by a racket maker, with the athlete, the racket, the strings and the measurement setup all chosen to produce the biggest possible number, and nobody has published how much each factor contributed. Because the shuttle loses speed so fast, where the speed is measured matters enormously: a reading taken a fraction of a second after contact is already well below the peak. That is why you shouldn't compare a broadcast readout from one tournament directly with a lab record from another.

How fast is your smash?

Probably nowhere near 565 km/h, and that is fine. Study data put strong club and advanced players around 200 km/h with a radar gun, and elite players higher still. To find out where you stand:

• Use the free smash speed calculator with a slow-motion video and count frames.
• Read how to measure smash speed to avoid the angle mistakes that make phone measurements wrong.
• Check the shuttle: speed ratings and temperature change how far it flies. See the shuttlecock speed chart.