Saina Nehwal: Farewell to a Prodigy

In the end, Saina Nehwal slipped out in a way uncharacteristic to her arrival. The first superstar of Indian badminton in the 21st century who made heads turn in 2008, first as a fresh-faced 18-year-old at the BWF World Junior Championships, which she won, and then at the Olympics later that year, reaching the quarter-finals in the Beijing Games, she eventually slipped away from the game quietly. She revealed in a podcast interview recently that she had hung her badminton racquet for good, and had in fact done so two years ago. It wasn’t so much an announcement of her retirement as a late acknowledgment that she had indeed stopped playing.

“I actually felt that I entered the sport on my own terms and left on my own terms, so there was no need to announce it,” Nehwal said in the podcast, revealing that a chronic knee condition had left her unable to cope with the demands of the sport. Nehwal had sustained a major knee injury at the Rio Olympics in 2016, and while she had made a come­back, winning many medals for sev­eral more years, it was known that her knees continued to trouble her.

It may seem a surprise now given the riches in Indian badmin­ton over the last decade, but when Nehwal first broke into the scene, there was no one like her. It had been a while since India had produced a champion player, both Prakash Padukone and Pullela Gopichand having retired a long while back, and Indian shuttlers then even struggled to break into the top 100. Nehwal, who it is said picked up a racket at the age of eight, reportedly to further the dream of her mother who had herself played badmin­ton, took Indian badminton to heights it had never seen before. Teaming first with the now legendary coach Gopichand, she be­came the first Indian badminton player to win an Olympic medal (a bronze at the London 2012 Games), the first Indian to be ranked number one in the world, and won many more prestigious medals and titles. But her great­est contribution was probably in serving as an inspiration for the next crop of champion players from India. And that has been visible for some time.