Samaiya Karim did not leave the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Sene­gal emp­ty-hand­ed Tuesday (No­vem­ber 3).

The 16-year-old bad­minton ace de­feat­ed Maryame Cisse of Sene­gal in her fi­nal Group D en­counter 2-0, cap­ping off an ex­pe­ri­ence-filled tour­na­ment with a vic­to­ry un­der her belt.

Her coach Zeu­di Mack said the re­sult is an achieve­ment that the coun­try should cel­e­brate.

Karim’s tri­umph was a cul­mi­na­tion of her con­tin­u­ous and de­ter­mined ef­forts.

Af­ter go­ing down to the Chi­hyun Cheng of Chi­nese Taipei in her match and France’s Neela Lengue te in the sec­ond, Karim re­turned to the court de­ter­mined, and un­der in­struc­tion from Mack, took one foot ahead by tak­ing 12 min­utes to dis­pose of home­town favourite Cisse 21-14.

Lat­er she made sure of no come­backs in the sec­ond set, this time, brush­ing aside her coun­ter­part by a 21-10 mar­gin in a game that last­ed 10 min­utes. Nei­ther play­er pro­gressed from the match, but Karim re­ceived some­thing to shout about, apart from the ex­pe­ri­ence.

Mack, in a com­ment, said, “Well, all I told her was that she need­ed to fo­cus on her game and to just take it one ral­ly at a time and don’t think about any­thing else.

I mean, just go­ing one ral­ly at a time, and of course, I point­ed out so many weak­ness­es that the per­son would have had in terms of what type of ral­ly to play.”

“And ba­si­cal­ly, what we want­ed to do was ral­ly, and then when she had a win­ner in terms of a weak high shot, she would smash more on the per­son’s back­hand side, and I was work­ing a lot for her. But I tried to keep her mo­ti­va­tion lev­el high, and you know, when she made an er­ror, I told her don’t wor­ry about that, just go nor­mal,” she said.

“Karim did make some er­rors, but it didn’t make an im­pact re­al­ly in the num­ber of points she gave away, so she was able to keep steady. I was speak­ing to her dur­ing some ral­lies and stuff, and I was just try­ing to re­it­er­ate, just one point at a time, one ral­ly at a time. Stick with the game plan.”

Mean­while, swim­mer Bre­an­na Bel­mar and Jaden Mills will plunge in­to the pool a sec­ond time to­day for the women’s and men’s 50-me­tre freestyle from just af­ter 6 am this morn­ing.

To­mor­row Bel­mar will con­clude her Olympic cam­paign with the 50-me­tre breast­stroke while Mills will con­test the 50-me­tre but­ter­fly, both hop­ing to se­cure fi­nal berths and hope­ful­ly be among the medal­ists.

Oth­er mem­ber of the T&T youth team, box­er Makieve Bellille and coach Wen­dell Jokhu de­part­ed yes­ter­day for Dakar.

Bellille will be­gin his medal quest on Sat­ur­day in the men’s 65kg pre­lim­i­nary round of 16 at the Dakar Ex­po Cen­tre.