Trying to find PV Sindhu’s current world-tour ranking is a bit like going on a treasure hunt. The Badminton World Federation (BWF) website has a default setting where it shows just ten names a page. You have to scroll down the third one before you spot ‘Pusarla V Sindhu’, at No. 26. But before Indian badminton fans eagerly hoping for a third consecutive Olympic medal start panicking, here’s the rider.
The top players in the world don’t play many tournaments in an Olympic year, and the rankings reflect that. Thailand’s Busanan Ongbamrungphan is not close to being the third-best player in the world, as her ranking would indicate. The rankings of Carolina Marin, Olympic champion in 2016 (23), Japan’s Akane Yamaguchi (22), Taipei’s Tai Tzu Ying (19) and China’s He Bing Jiao (16) – four of the favourites to win gold alongside South Korea’s An Se-young and China’s Chen Yu Fei – explains all you need to know.
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Stacked against that is the fact that Sindhu hasn’t won a major title since the Singapore Open in 2022, where she beat Wang Zhi Yi, the current World No. 1, in three games. There was a Commonwealth Games gold too soon after, but the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese don’t play there. In recent times, the only result that really stands out was at the Malaysia Masters in May, where she took Wang to three games in the final.
Why, then, is there so much cautious optimism about Sindhu and a three-peat in Paris?
For one, she has done most of her preparation away from the spotlight. Secondly, the powers that be recognized, that it made no sense to force her to work alongside Pullela Gopichand, the national coach who was also her first mentor in the game. The relationship between the two took a turn for the worse in the year leading up to the delayed Tokyo Olympics, for reasons best known to both.
Since then, Sindhu has been guided by Korea’s Park Tae-sang and others, before settling on Prakash Padukone, India’s first All England title winner back in 1980. Padukone and Vimal Kumar, another former stalwart who is chief coach at his academy, will both be in Paris to try and mastermind another medal run for Sindhu.
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What goes in Sindhu’s favour is her knack of upsetting the odds on the biggest stage. Back in Rio in 2016, Sindhu was seeded No. 9, but she put out Tai (No. 8 seed), Wan Yi Han (No. 2) and Nozomi Okuhara (No. 6) on her way to the final, where she took the first game against Marin, then world No. 1.
Five years later, in the Covid-19-affected Tokyo Games, Sindhu was the sixth seed. This time, she beat Yamaguchi, the No. 4 seed, in the quarterfinals, before seeing off the challenge of He, then the No. 8, in the bronze-medal match. It was no different when Sindhu won World Championship gold in Basel in 2019. She had to defeat Tai (No. 2 seed), Chen (No. 4) and Okuhara (No. 3) in back-to-back matches to clinch the title.
The critics might say that Sindhu isn’t half the player she was in 2019, and that her recent results reflect that. But lowered expectations may just help her. The world’s top players, most of whom she has defeated in the biggest tournaments, certainly won’t be taking her lightly.
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