The engineering exam that Pullela Gopichand (luckily) failed: ‘Would have been a disaster’

Pullela Gopichand at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave

Pullela Gopichand needs no introduction. From 1996, he was Indian national badminton champion five years in a row. He won the bronze medal at the 1998 Commonwealth Games. In 2001, he became the second Indian to win the All England Open Badminton Championships after Prakash Padukone. Gopichand’s retirement from the game only gave a new lease to his career - as coach of the Indian national badminton team, he has guided India to two Olympic medals.

But Pullela Gopichand’s remarkable career in badminton is as much a result of luck as it is of innate talent and discipline. Speaking at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave 2023 in Bengaluru today, the chief national coach of the Indian badminton team revealed an incident that led to his becoming a badminton player.

Gopichand attributed his career in badminton to a lucky failure in an engineering exam. He revealed that he could have been an engineer but life had other things in store for him.

He said that he wrote an exam for an engineering course where he randomly ticked answers. He needed 45 marks to qualify for the course. Instead, he scored only 38.

“I wrote an engineering exam where 45 was the pass marks. I was randomly ticking stuff and I got 38,” Gopichand revealed, laughing along with the audience at the event.

“If seven of those ticks had been right, I would have got a sports quota and ended up as an engineer, which would have been a disaster for the engineering side,” he concluded, chuckling in amusement.