Lakshya Sen: Shuttle Star

THIS YEAR WASN’T going Lakshya Sen’s way. After the breakthrough season he had last year—where the badminton player took down some of the biggest names in the business on his way to several titles and a World No 6 in the Badminton World Federation (BWF) rankings—it all appeared to be unravelling quickly. It began with the delayed recovery period after a surgery Sen underwent—for a deviated septum—a period during which he says his immunity was low, and he was constantly falling ill. On the court, he was sluggish and constantly crashing out early from tournaments. This showed in his rankings. He went from World No 6 in November last year to 25 in just a few months. And when he crashed out of yet another tournament earlier this year, the Swiss Open Super 300, he took a break from badminton, stating in an Instagram post that he wanted to focus on his mental and physical health.

What was going on with one of the most talented shuttlers in the country? When was the Sen of last year going to show up? Could he even? Also, this isn’t any other year. It is the year of Olympic qualifications. If you perform well, you can book yourself a slot for Paris next year, and who knows what awaits an athlete there.

As the recently concluded Canada Open showed, Sen is very much that player of 2022, if not more. He picked up the second Super 500 title of his career when he comprehensively beat the current All England champion, China’s Li Shifeng, in the final. After winning the opener, when he conceded a 20-16 lead in the second, it might have appeared as though he was on the verge of throwing it all away. But Sen was ruthless this time, chipping away at that four-point difference as Shifeng watched on helplessly. Sen eventually took the game 21-18, 22-20. “Lakshya did not give up at 20-16. It is so easy to slip into that frame of mind that he’s won the first and can play the decider… It’s a combination of being mentally and physically fit that he could remain calm even when things got close,” his coach Anup Sridhar later told the Indian Express.

Sen’s rise in badminton has been anything but meteoric. A resident of Almora in Uttarakhand, it is said he began playing the game when he was just five years old. Sen’s elder brother Chirag is also a badminton player, and his father DK Sen, is a coach. By 10, Sen had moved to Bengaluru to train at the Prakash Padukone Academy. And in a few years, he was dominating the junior circuit, picking up a clutch of prestigious titles, including the 2018 Asian Junior Championships, the first by an Indian in 53 years, silver at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, and a bronze at the 2018 World Junior Championships 2018, and at one point in 2017, he was ranked junior World No 1.

He announced his arrival on the senior circuit when he won a bronze at the 2021 World Championships. But it was really 2022 when he gatecrashed into the big league. Sen went from being just another plucky kid in the circuit to someone you needed to take very seriously. He began beating the biggest names in the business, leaving his more experienced Indian peers behind, as he went on to win a clutch of titles, from his maiden BWF Super 500 title at the India Open, silver at the All England Championships, a Commonwealth Games gold where he came from behind to win against the Malaysian Ng Tze Yong, to playing an integral role in India’s maiden Thomas Cup triumph. It is no surprise that Sen was suddenly being discussed as the future of Indian badminton. Of the three Indian men currently ranked in the top 20 in singles, both HS Prannoy (ranked 9) and Srikanth Kidambi (ranked 20) are 30 years old. Sen, who has now moved to 12 in rankings, is just 21.

It was when he began to falter this season that some began to wonder if their faith in his abilities had been a bit premature. Sen has just proved that is far from true.

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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