Indian badminton on right track, will get more medals in post-Covid world: National coach Pullela Gopichand

In the past decade, badminton has emerged to be one of the key sport in which India appears to be a front-runner for winning big medals, whether it is in the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games or the Asian Games.

PV Sindhu’s loss to Carolina Marin in the finals of the 2016 Rio Olympics was a moment of heartbreak for the entire nation. Yet, it was also the biggest moment in the history of the sport in India.

One of the key architects of this revolution of Indian badminton is the former All-England champion and the current chief national badminton coach Pullela Gopichand.

His academy in Hyderabad, the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy, is where the top players in the country including Saina Nehwal, P. V. Sindhu, Kidambi Srikanth, Parupalli Kashyap, among others train.

Pullela Gopichand is of the opinion that this is perhaps the best time for badminton in the country, with numerous players in the top rung pushing each other at the highest level.

“The numbers that we have playing the sport and the numbers that are doing well gives you a lot of scope for the future,” says Gopichand.

Looking at the changes that have taken place in the sport from the time when he was a player, Gopichand adds, “When I was playing there were hardly 40-50 players playing badminton across the country, but today that number is in thousands.”

Pullela Gopichand, who is regarded as one of India’s best badminton players of all time, became the second Indian player after Prakash Padukone in 1980, to win the All-England Championship in 2001. He retired the following year due to repeated injuries, and then went into coaching full-time, and has created several champions since then.

Tata Trusts badminton training programme in Mizoram

Apart from his academy in Hyderabad, he is involved in a Tata Trusts badminton training programme which seeks to develop talent in Mizoram.

After the 2016 Rio Olympics, the Mizoram government had shown interest in the programme and they had reached out to the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Foundation. The Tata Trusts also came aboard and the programme was launched in October 2018, which the aim of honing talent right from the grass-root level in the state.

The head of the sports initiative at Tata Trusts, Neelam Babardesai, said that currently there are over 860 players playing at the various levels in the state, and even in these unprecedent times, virtual training with the Gopichand Badminton Academy has continued.

There has been a culture of badminton in Mizoram, Babardesai says, with each community having a badminton court of its own, and the aim of the Tata Trusts badminton programme, she adds, is to provide the kind of training required to nurture an international level-player without them having to go outside the state.

In the current situation, virtual training sessions are being run by the Gopichand Badminton Academy. Speaking about the challenges of virtual training, Gopichand says, “As far as training virtually is concerned, it is a challenge across the world. I was surprised to see the kind of effort kids here [in Mizoram] have been putting up online, so we are very happy to see the training happen.

“There are challenges, but these are unprecendent times, we have never had an issue like this, but it is good that we are able to use training at this mode, because going forward when things become normal and players get back on court, I’m sure that this way of teaching, this way of monitoring will help us monitor things and be part of the Mizoram story, wherever we are.”