New Delhi: Chief badminton coach Pullela Gopichand, who guided Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu to Olympic medals in the successive Games, says he was lucky that he wasn’t good in studies and it was a flunked IIT exam that paved his way to be a successful sportsperson.
“My brother and I both played sports. He was fantastic in sports and now I feel that I was lucky I wasn’t good in studies,” Gopichand said while discussing how sports requires commitment from both parents and sacrifices and sometimes luck also plays a part.
“He was a state champion. He wrote his IIT exam and passed. He went to IIT and stopped playing. I wrote the engineering exam and failed and I continued in sports and this is where I stand now. I think you have to be focused and even lucky sometimes,” the 42-year-old said.
Gopichand went on to become only the second Indian to win the All England title in 2001 and soon after he retired and decided to open his own academy.
The journey to set up the academy was not an easy one as he faced many rejections when he went to ask for help from different quarters to arrange the finance.
Talking about one such incident, Gopichand said: “I remember having gone to a cetain PSU few years back. I was made to wait for three continuous days outside the room when they promised me support for badminton but after waiting from 9 in the morning to 5:30 in the evening after three days a certain officer at a high position came up to me and said that badminton doesn’t have the eyeballs to be a world sport.
“That was the last day I had gone ahead and asked anybody for sponsorship. The same night I went back home and thanks to my parents and wife, we mortgaged our house and that is how the academy came up,” Gopichand said in a felicitation ceremony by IIFCL here yesterday.
In the last 12 years since setting up his academy in Hyderabad, Gopichand produced two Olympic medallist and he said he never thought his dream to see India win an Olympic medal in badminton would come true so soon.
“I started the academy in 2004 with 25 young kids. Sindhu was one of my youngest kid at about eight years and P Kashyap was the oldest at 15. When I started coaching I had this dream that India would win an Olympic medal someday. I didn’t know that we could so soon in 2012 win our first medal,” he said.
“I think maybe I should retire now because my goals were all finished and done with,” he said on a lighter note.
PTI
