By Recently, India’s ace badminton player PV Sindhu achieved the distinction of being in the Forbes’ list of 2023’s highest paid female athletes. She shared the 16th position with the US gymnast Simon Biles with her 7.1 million USD earnings. It is even more commendable that this iconic sportswoman has made into the Forbes’ list of highest paid female athletes in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022 too.
However, behind the glitter of worldwide fame and enormous wealth of this champion shuttler, who is the recipient of Arjuna Award, Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award (now named as Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award), Padmi Shri and Padma Bhushan, lies the story of great determination, uncompromising discipline, and unflagging hard work, which helped her awesome badminton talent to reach the pinnacle of global stage.
Showing Her Mettle
Born and brought up in Hyderabad, Pusarla Venkata Sindhu, perhaps the most famous badminton player from India, is the only female from India to win two individual medals in Olympics. Sindhu is the daughter of national level volleyball players and her father Ramana was an Arjuna Award winner too. So, it is not surprising that excellence in sports is perhaps coded in her genes, but there is no denying the fact that it takes huge hard work and dedication to make the genes work to their full or near full potential.
Sindhu, who began her journey in badminton at the age of eight after being inspired by the celebrated former badminton player, and renowned badminton coach, Pullela Gopichand, used to commute 56 km daily for training at coaching camps at the initial stage of her career and used to reach there daily on time. This showed her resolve and determination even at the early stage of her sports career. She also was displaying remarkable stamina even at the formative stage of her career. “This is one of the most significant aspects of her game and should take her a long way,” said Gopichand to The Hindu in 2008, while discussing her extraordinary stamina.
Sindhu learnt the basics of badminton with the guidance of Mehboob Ali at the badminton courts of the Indian Railway Institute of Signal Engineering and Telecommunications in Secunderabad before joining Pullela Gopichand’s Gopichand Badminton Academy.
The Takeoff
Sindhu entered international circuit in 2009, when she was only 14. In that year itself, she won a bronze medal at the 2009 Sub-Junior Asian Badminton Championships, which was held in Colombo. In the following year, she achieved the distinction of reaching the quarterfinals of the 2010 BWF World Junior Championships, which was held in Mexico. The signs of the coming superstar in badminton whom the sports world would sit up and take notice of, were already evident…
Triumphs for her at the court began to follow in quick succession. In 2012, she won Badminton Asia Junior Championships held in Gimcheon, South Korea, by defeating Japan’s Nozomi Okuhara in girls’ singles category. This made her the then 16-year-old the first Indian to win Badminton Asia Junior Championships.
Triumphs and Glory
In the following year, she won her first of the five medals at the BWF World Championships, when she secured a bronze. She went on to win one more bronze medal, two more silver medals, and one gold medal at different editions of the BWF World Championships. Sindhu is only the second woman in the world, after China’s Zhang Ning, to win five or more singles medals in the prestigious competition.
