PV Sindhu’s Golden Dream

WITH THE CRUTCH of hindsight, it is perhaps a good thing that the PV Sindhu biopic—rumoured to be in various stages of cre­ation from all the way back in 2017—hasn’t yet been made, for it is only now in 2024 that she will have the rarest opportunity to go from “India’s Greatest Female Athlete” to “India’s Great­est Ever Athlete”, gender notwithstanding. Because if Sindhu medals at the Paris Olympics later this year—any medal, even a bronze—she will have done what no man or woman from this country has achieved before: win three medals from individual disciplines at the Olympic Games.

But it isn’t just any medal that Sindhu is after. No. Only the ecstasy of that elusive gold, the age-old quest to find El Dorado, could’ve motivated her to pull herself up and dream on after having experienced a couple of nightmarish seasons.

One of the fundamentals of writing a screenplay, be it for the movies or even for the stage, is to insert a conflict worth resolving by the end. Up until the Covid-hit Tokyo Games in 2021, Sindhu’s career was seemingly free of turbulence, the girl from Hyderabad seeking and finding perfection in her sport with a silver at the Rio Games in 2016 and a bronze in the following Olympics, along with India’s first-ever gold at the World Championships in Basel, 2019, which made her receive the country’s third-highest civilian honour in the Padma Bhushan in 2020.

All of this made her a role model for not just women but all aspiring sportspersons across the nation, many of whom picked up the badminton racquet because of her. But then, just when no one was expecting it, least of all Sindhu, by late 2022, the conflicts began to arrive in her life in spades.

First, in August of that year at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, Sindhu carried on against Canada’s Michelle Li in the final despite feeling a twinge in her ankle. It was worth it in terms of winning her only CWG gold, but that ankle was diagnosed with a hairline fracture, which meant months out of the sport to recuperate and a drop in the rankings. Then, when she finally returned in 2023, there was that very public on-court spat with Carolina Marin, the same Spaniard who had denied her gold at the Rio Olympics, and Sindhu even clashing racquets under the net at the Denmark Open.

The troubles worsened at the French Open in October last year, when she felt a niggle in her left knee while she took on Supanida Katethong of Thailand. Somehow, she marched on to win the first game but the pain soon made her forfeit a match mid-way for the first time in her career. The knee injury was a bad one, forcing her to miss two months of action and also bid to protect her rankings just outside the top 10.

If that wasn’t already a Herculean challenge for the 28-year-old—young in life years but properly middle-aged in terms of being a singles player in her sport—there was further upheaval back home as Sindhu reassessed her team, overhauled it, and for the first time in her life, moved out of Hyderabad and shifted base to Ben­galuru late last year to train under the watchful eyes of Prakash Padukone, her new mentor. With this new-found guidance, along with a new full-time coach in Indone­sia’s Agus Dwi Santoso, both life and career have begun to settle once again. But Sindhu hasn’t forgotten the period of heavy tumult, which she calls “the lows”, or use them for fu­ture learnings, which the best tend to do when dealt with a lousy hand.

“From the bad days I have learned to be patient,” Sindhu said in an interview with First Sports. “This is where the mental aspect of things is important be­cause there is a lot running through your mind when you aren’t playing. I needed to accept it but, still, men­tally I was worried and sad. But the lows teach you to become stronger in the future, and recently, there have been a lot of downs.” It was Padukone, India’s first cham­pion at All-England back in 1980, who reached out to Sindhu in October last year and asked her if she needed help after he had read in the newspapers that she was feeling mentally tired. The work began in the form of pep talks and only gradually moved on to the court, Padukone’s mentoring having such an effect on Sindhu that she decided to stop flitting between her home in Hyderabad and Bengaluru for these sessions and move lock, stock, and barrel.

WHAT MAKES SINDHU a true icon is the fact that she isn’t just willing to learn, but also un­learn. Apart from all the mental conditioning, Padukone also had to get her to forget some of the game­play instructions passed down by her previous coaches. “She was a bit confused about the strategy to adopt as she had changed coaches after the departure of Park Tae-sang and each one of them had advised her different things. So, my first job was to make her understand what strategy and tactics to adopt while playing different opponents,” Padukone told The Indian Express. “We had to work on her physical parameters to make her fit, which in turn will al­low her to play the attacking game that suits her best. My take is that whenever you are physically strong and you know that you prepared well for an event, automatically you become mentally strong.”

But all of this work and training was set into motion with one long-term goal. “Olympic gold,” said Padukone to the same daily. “Nothing less than that.”

Reprogrammed, it was now time to put Sindhu 2.0 to the test in the new year, under strict instruc­tions from her mentor to try and win every tourna­ment that she participates in before the Paris Games. So, she did. Her comeback began on February 18 in Shah Alam, Malaysia, at the Badminton Asia Team Championships, where Sindhu and young Anmol Kharb gave India a historic first gold medal by beating Thailand 3-2 in the final. She has now travelled back to where her body had broken down last year, the French Open. And shortly, she participates in the All-England Championships, where a win has thus far eluded her. But this time, she will have a former winner of the tournament in Padukone travelling with her.

Even then, each subsequent challenge will only get tougher and at this point, the odds are stacked against the 28-year-old. For, at its very core, singles badminton is a young person’s domain—the sport’s runaway No 1 in South Ko­rea’s An Se-young having just turned 22 is a case in point. But already, by simply tackling this slump and medalling in Malaysia, Sindhu has proven that she isn’t shy of putting in the hard yards and overcoming obstacles. How she deals with the examinations of the next few months, followed by the biggest one in Paris in July, will come to define her legacy. Already she is a pioneer in India, inspiring men and women of all ages to be better at what they do. If she medals in Paris, she will be immortalised. And if that medal happens to be gold, the new script for her long-pending biopic would’ve pretty much written itself.

badmintonIndia’s Greatest Female AthleteOlympicsPrakash PadukonePV Sindhusportswomen achieversWomen Issue 2024