Who are India's next generation of Badminton stars?

Mint

20 hours ago

Lakshya Sen was twice in a position to grab a medal in badminton at the Paris 2024 Olympics. In the semi-final, he lost to Viktor Axelsen after seeming in control of the match early on. A win would have taken him to the final and a guaranteed medal. In the match for a bronze, Sen led his opponent by a game before losing the next two.
Those defeats summed up 2024 for Indian badminton, as a year in which the country's premier badminton players appeared to have lost their lustre. There were no singles titles for any player—Sen has won only one title since the Olympics, the Syed Modi India International in December, and hasn't made it past any quarter-finals this year.
'He would have won more, but the competitive environment is not set for him. He is brilliant, but it's not his fault (for not winning more)," says Parupalli Kashyap, a former world No.6 who has now pivoted to coaching. 'His work ethic and attitude are great. He has pulled off some amazing matches in the past. But if you see now, his performances have dropped considerably."
Sen follows a generation of badminton players who, under the tutelage of Pullela Gopi Chand achieved considerable success, turning India into a badminton powerhouse. In 2022, Indian men won the Thomas Cup team event for the first time in its 70-odd-year history, showcasing an all-round strength and depth.
Saina Nehwal won an Olympic bronze medal in 2012 London, P. V. Sindhu got two, a silver in 2016 Rio de Janeiro and a bronze in 2020 (held in 2021) Tokyo, ranking as high as No.2. Kidambi Srikanth was once world No.1, a silver medallist in the 2021 World Championships while H.S. Prannoy, once world No.6, finished third in the 2023 World Championships.
But that was in the past. After a long gap now, no Indian player—male or female—features in the top 10 rankings. Sen, at No.17, is the highest while Sindhu, 30, is at No.15, having slid out of the top 10 in October last year. Srikanth, 32, and Prannoy, 33, are in the 30s in ranking as well. All of them are dealing with issues of fitness, motivation and consistency as the rigour of the sport takes a toll.
Indian badminton seems to be undergoing a transition, from a generation of players who were consistently in the top 10, won a host of titles and catalysed the sport to waiting for the next lot to make a mark. With the World Championships starting 25 August, coincidentally in Paris, the venue for last year's Olympics, the sport is looking at new beginnings.
'At this point of my career, each and every win matters," Prannoy told the Badminton World Federation (BWF) website after a first-round win in the China Open this month. 'The level of men's singles has gone really high, so winning each round is getting tougher. The average age in men's singles has become 22-23 all of a sudden; a lot of fresh faces, we don't know what their game is. So it's tough to be a veteran of this," added Prannoy, who has lost in the first or second round of all his 11 tournaments this year.
Looking Ahead
Ayush Shetty, 20, won the US Open, a BWF Super 300 category event, in June and is currently the second highest ranked Indian male. Earlier this week, Unnati Hooda, 17, beat Sindhu in the China Open. Vennala Kalagotla, 17, and Tanvi Sharma, 16, finished third in the Asian Junior Championships last Sunday in Indonesia. Malvika Bansod, 23, won a title at the Azerbaijan International last year, finished third at the US Open, and was runner-up at the Hylo Open in Germany. Anupama Upadhyaya, now 20, was a few years ago the world's top-ranked junior.
These are just a few names of upcoming players, but it's also early days for them, competing in a bruising, physically taxing sport in which a Prannoy, 33, is considered a veteran.
'We are nimble-footed and have supple wrists, but this sport is tough for Indian bodies where few like Sindhu have lasted largely injury free," adds Kashyap.
While there has been a substantial increase in the number of children taking to the sport over the last decades, along with the spread of infrastructure and support from parents, badminton remains an expensive sport and opportunities to succeed at the elite level is limited. Some of these challenges even prompted the national coach Gopi Chand to recently say that the sport should be pursued only by the wealthy, because it does not offer job security or a guaranteed success.
In Guntur, where Vennala grew up, her father Kalagotla Srinivasa Reddy was keen that she pick up a sport. The choice was between tennis and badminton, but when Reddy went to the tennis courts, he got intimidated by the fancy cars parked outside. Badminton became an easier option, which the child soon fell in love with.
'My father was a ball badminton player with ambitions of participating in the Olympics," Vennala says, back home from Solo, Indonesia. 'But since ball badminton is not part of the Olympics, he could not, but was keen that my brother and I follow that Olympic dream."
The bronze medal, which has got her a direct entry into the BWF World Junior Championships in October, is a reward for all the 'sacrifices, early morning sessions," she says, bringing in the motivation to do better.
'It's the start of something bigger," she says over the phone.
Passing the Baton
Kashyap believes that the sport is not being organised in a way to optimise results, with 'too many heads working for a cause that does not make sense". Top players train at different centres, often lacking in adequate sparring partners, which would help in raising their standards. There is no second string of players getting funded consistently, he adds, despite efforts of not-for profit agencies like Olympic Gold Quest, GoSports and Reliance Foundation, which supports Vennala, among others.
The lockdown in 2020, 2021, also made a debilitating difference to continuity, according to Nikhil Kanetkar, who runs an eponymous coaching centre in Pune. 'Every day of training matters. Not being able to play for a year and more was difficult. It put us back. Maybe in other countries, they were holed up in their (training) centres. That perhaps gave them an advantage."
'For me as a coach, for example, I had to start from zero. We lost a generation of players," adds Kanetkar, who was Gopi Chand's contemporary as a player in the late 1990s and 2000s.
He says that players like Nehwal, Srikanth and Sindhu raised the sport to such a high standard in the country that it's difficult to maintain that level seamlessly. 'We should have had a backup (of players) to them, four-five years ago maybe."
According to him, players do not have the patience to stay in one coaching centre for longer, which affects their growth. 'One national centre, like in Guwahati (National Centre of Excellence), would probably make sense, but all top players have to be there together. The system has to gear to that, get the best coaches, how China does it," Kanetkar adds.
Badminton in India is at a crossroad, but everyone agrees that with the depth of talent available, the transition will happen, even if it takes a little longer.
'What I learnt is to be happy, but to never get satisfied," says Vannala.
Arun Janardhan is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle. He posts @iArunJ.