Saina Nehwal fell out with coach Gopi when her Olympic win got him students like PV Sindhu

In Dreams of a Billion, Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta write about Saina Nehwal’s journey to Olympic win and her turbulent relationship with her coach.

Women's singles gold medalist Saina Nehwal and silver medalist PV Sindhu in Gold Coast, Australia on Sunday. PTI/ Manvender Vashist

Saina Nehwal won Indian badminton’s first Olympic medal with her bronze at the London 2012 games, but it was at the Beijing Games of 2008 that we first witnessed Indian badminton’s potential. Saina, a student of the Gopichand Academy in Hyderabad, made it to the Olympic quarter-final only to lose to Indonesia’s Maria Kristin Yulianti in a match she should have won.

Gopichand had started to deliver results and this potential had made everyone hopeful. The credibility of the Beijing breakthrough was further strengthened by a gold medal-winning effort from Kashyap at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi. Going into the 2014 Guangzhou Asian Games, hopes had soared for badminton. Gopi was determined to keep the medals coming and, in trying to do so, was relentlessly pushing his wards.

‘That’s what resulted in a misunderstanding between Saina, Gopi sir and I during the Asian Games,’ said Kashyap, who married Saina in December 2018. ‘Saina and I were going out at the time. While we were both 100 per cent committed to badminton, we also had a life of our own. Gopi sir was upset, thinking we might end up neglecting the game. It wasn’t the best thing to happen and our performances at the Asian Games suffered as a result.’ Gopi, who had helped Saina grow as an athlete and had great hopes from Kashyap, sees it slightly differently.

‘I am no moral police to tell them what to do and what not to do. They are all adults and they have a life of their own. But as a coach, it is my job to make them realize their potential and that’s what I was trying to do. It was a rather complicated situation and none of us benefitted from what happened,’ said Gopi. With things starting to get ugly and them not speaking to each other, it was left to Gopi to get Saina back on track. ‘In 2011, I went up to Saina and told her that together we could win that elusive Olympic medal. We had every chance of making history as long as she allowed me to fashion her training for the next twelve months. I have to say I was doing it for myself as well. I wanted that Olympic medal as bad as she did and did not want to leave anything to chance,’ said Gopi. ‘Yes, I clearly remember Gopi sir speaking to Saina and the two of them getting back together. He promised her he would not leave Hyderabad even for a day if she would be there and I have to say, he kept his promise. It was as important for Saina as it was for each of us. Without Gopi sir, we felt lost. We would even cry. Don’t forget we were all young and she was, in fact, a teenager. We needed Gopi sir’s guiding hand. Without him, there would have been no London,’ Kashyap reiterates.

In the months leading up to the London Olympics, Gopi had added high-intensity training to Saina’s schedule and both she and Kashyap benefitted from the change. ‘We had never trained like that before and, as a result, we were fitter and ready for fast-paced matches going into the Olympics. Had Saina not had a bout of viral fever just before the Games, she would have been even better prepared,’ Kashyap remembers.

While Saina lost a tactical battle to China’s Wang Yihan in the semifinal in London 2012, it was yet another lesson for Gopi and the Indian contingent. ‘She failed to understand what Wang Yihan was doing. It was part of her strategy to deliberately make Saina wait before every serve, and when it was Saina’s turn to serve, Wang would start moving around the court and take more time, much to Saina’s displeasure. Saina should have done the same and not allowed Wang to get away with what she was doing. Instead, she tried to push the pace and each time she wasn’t allowed to do so, she lost momentum,’ Gopi lamented.

‘I even remember Gopi sir yelling at Saina, telling her what Wang Yihan was doing. But the enormity of the occasion had consumed her and she was unable to stem the tide. In the evening she was hugely depressed and, I have to tell you, it was an ordeal to speak to her. Gopi sir was determined to show her the recording of the match to be able to tell her what went wrong because she was playing another Chinese player in Li Xuerei the next day. It was the bronze medal match and she couldn’t afford to slip,’ explained Kashyap. ‘It was very hard. She was depressed and just not willing to listen to anything I had to say. Losing a semi-final is the hardest thing at the Olympics. All of a sudden, you risk losing out on a medal despite making the last four. That’s what was weighing on her mind and it took a lot of effort to push her to agree to watch the match and understand what went wrong,’ Gopi recollected.

Saina was lucky in winning the bronze the next day with an injured Li retiring hurt from the playoff. Years of endurance and labour had finally translated into an Olympic medal for her and Gopi. ‘We were waiting for her at the practice courts behind the medal ceremony,’ remembered Kashyap. ‘She finally had the medal around her neck and I can’t describe what it meant to each one of us. More importantly, the effort we had put in made a difference to our games and within months I was in the top ten and Saina in the top five of the world. Seeing us break into the top ten, the next crop of players had all started to believe it was possible. Srikanth, Sai, Guru, Prannoy and the next lot of players training at the academy all benefitted from her medal. It was our real breakthrough moment,’ Kashyap argued.

While things should have taken an upward turn for Indian badminton after the London Olympics, Gopi’s life was soon caught in a quagmire as he was trying to help Saina while also helping the lot of upcoming players who had all started to make giant strides in their games. Sindhu, who up until then was in Saina’s shadow, was making big statements on the world stage and had started to beat higher-ranked opponents in the circuit. From one star student in Saina, Gopi now had his hands full with a group of players all capable of winning medals for India. With no one to back him up, it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to take care of each of the players who craved and needed one-on-one attention and guidance. It was Sindhu’s bronze medal at the 2013 World Championships that made things more and more complicated for Gopi. By this time people around Saina had started to influence her, suggesting that Gopi wasn’t giving her undivided attention anymore. She was often left to fend for herself. After losing the World Championships in 2013, she went on a downward spiral.

‘Saina felt Gopi sir was hers and hers alone. It was a very different bond that the two of them had. For years Gopi had worked on her. All of a sudden Gopi had a lot of players to look after and Sindhu had started to show good results. Again, I don’t blame either Saina or Gopi for the fallout. I had started to see things go wrong and did my best to control the negativity. But I was helpless,’ said Kashyap. ‘Each time Gopi tried to discipline Saina she would take it as an affront,’ he added. ‘She wasn’t willing to buckle down and do things the way Gopi wanted her to. She wasn’t in the best headspace and nor was Gopi. When we look back and take stock of the situation, things could have been better handled by both of them.’

Things came to a head at the World Championships of 2014 in Denmark. Yet again, Sindhu did brilliantly to win a bronze, her second successive World Championship medal, while Saina failed to rise up to her favourite tag, losing out early. She, as Kashyap says, was shattered. Gopi had promised to speak to Saina at the end of the tournament and sort things out but the situation had spiralled out of control. She wasn’t willing to wait anymore and had made up her mind on leaving the academy. Gopi, on the other hand, was very keen to have her stay but hadn’t done enough to salvage the situation. With a lot of negativity around, Saina decided to leave Hyderabad and move to Bengaluru to the Prakash Padukone Academy and train with Vimal Kumar.

‘It was as if something very dear was being taken away from me. Earlier, I had literally begged her not to go. But by then she had been influenced by others and had already made up her mind. While I did not want to hold her back and stall her progress, I knew this was something that wasn’t beneficial for either of us. Yes, I indeed had other players to look after and Sindhu had made serious progress in the two years between 2012 and 2014. But I had never intended to neglect Saina. Maybe I wasn’t able to convey this to her,’ said Gopi. ‘Maybe Viren or Vimal or Prakash sir could have spoken to her. I don’t know why they did not. In fact, they encouraged her to leave Hyderabad. It is a mystery to me why Prakash sir has never said anything positive about me while I have always looked up to him as my role model,’ he said with a sense of disappointment.

This excerpt from Dreams of a Billion: India and the Olympic Games by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta has been published with permission from HarperCollins India.