- Thursday, March 06, 2025
No Indian player has won three Olympic medals on the trot and a podium finish at Paris will make Sindhu India’s greatest athlete
By: Shajil Kumar
FROM spending time in a hypoxic chamber to sparring with a variety of partners to adapt to different styles, Indian badminton ace PV Sindhu has left no stone unturned to be battle-ready for the Paris Games, where she will be chasing an unprecedented third consecutive Olympic medal.
Sindhu’s form has been patchy of late but she says the hat-trick of medals is very much possible because the last eight months spent with mentor Prakash Padukone has instilled confidence in her.
No Indian player has won three Olympic medals on the trot and a podium finish will make Sindhu arguably India’s greatest athlete.
“I am aiming for a medal, definitely, yes. Whether it’s one or two or three, it doesn’t matter. I’ve won two medals and I don’t want to take pressure by thinking that, oh, what is the third one,” she said after a training session at Porte de la Chapelle Arena here.
“Every time I play Olympics, it’s a new Olympics for me. So every time I go out there, I want to get a medal and hopefully, I will do that hat trick soon.”
Sindhu had won silver and bronze in the last two Olympics at Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo respectively.
Before coming to Paris, Sindhu trained at Sportcampus Saar in Saarbrucken, Germany where the altitude, the weather, and the conditions are similar to the French capital.
There she created a hypoxic chamber (low oxygen) in her room and slept for a couple of days. Hypoxic chambers help prepare an athlete’s body to function at higher-altitude places.
“I couldn’t go to the high altitude training centre. I didn’t have much time and obviously, there I couldn’t have been playing. So I just thought, it would be good for me instead of going somewhere, getting it here and doing some changes and sleeping that way,” she explained.
Sindhu said she has improved her strokes and is more consistent during the long rallies.
“Saarbrücken training was really good. I was there for almost a couple of weeks and I got my own sparring partners as well. I got an opportunity to train with different people. One was like a left-hander and one was an attacking player, a rally player.
Sindhu was an underdog in the 2016 Olympics, while she competed at Tokyo Games as an experienced player.
Talking about her journey, Sindhu said: “I’ve experienced two different kinds of Olympics where, in one, a lot of people shouted and cheered, but there was no pressure. In the second one, there were a lot of responsibilities and pressure, everybody wanted you to get a medal, but there was no crowd.”
“But now it’s a mixture of both (in Paris). I’m hoping for the best medal to come out there.” (PTI)
