Gopichand, the mentor

Rohit Mahajan

Advertisement

Tribune News Service

Rio de Janeiro, August 20

Pullella Gopichand, like the truly tough men, is soft-spoken and gentle. But don’t let that fool you, he’s tough all right. His own career was nearly finished by a very bad knee injury in 1994, but he came back from hell — he dragged himself out of a precipice by his very fingernails.

So, Gopichand knows very well how to become a champ, and he knows what he’s doing as he works to create champs in India. He’s a very conscientious man — when he was to leave for Rio, he himself went on a very strict, low-carb diet, for he didn’t want to get unwell here. “I didn’t want to get injured or be sick,” Gopi says. “I knew we wouldn’t have many sparring partners here, so I had to hit with the team. Luckily, my body stood by me.”

And Gopi stood by his players — one of them, PV Sindhu, won the women’s singles silver. For the second Olympics in a row, a Gopi trainee has won an Olympics medal — in 2012, it was Saina Nehwal with her bronze, of course.

Cool Sindhu

After she lost the final, PV Sindhu went to Carolina Marin’s side of the court and congratulated her; as they both got to their feet, Sindhu picked up Carolina’s racquet, which the Spaniard had dropped to the floor; then Sindhu walked to the side of the court, placed Carolina’s racquet near her bag, and quietly walked away. This is good sportsmanship — a lot of people believe that this is wasted on Carolina, who’s known to indulge in mind games and gamesmanship before and during her matches. Gopi, though, approved of the way his girl conducted herself yesterday, and through the last week.

“It’s not just the silver medal, the way she’s fought, the way she’s behaved, she’s a real champion,” said Gopi. “I’m really proud of her.”

And quite a few people are proud of Gopi as well.

He shrugs off the compliments quietly and says that he owes his success to God. “Bhagwaan ki kripa hai,” he says. “A lot of people do a lot of hard work, but God has just been kind to me.”

He says that right from the time he first saw her, when she was eight, he knew that Sindhu was special. “She had a solid work ethic... She’s always ready to work as much as you want her to,” says the coach. “Bas match mein kabhi kabhi perform nahi karti thi, emotional hoti thi, aur dar jaati thi (Sometimes, she wouldn’t perform well, let her emotions get the better of her),” says Gopi. “As a person, she is extremely friendly. She can quickly make friends with anybody. But on the court, you need to be focussed, put your head down, and be a different person altogether. Sometimes, that’s a conflict that happens. She needs to know how to balance both.”

She won a bronze medal at the 2013 World Championships, and repeated it the next year; however, she didn’t zoom to the top after that — she’s still ranked No. 9 in the world, which is good. Gopi knew that she can become better than that. “After the CWG and Asian Games bronze medals, there was no consistency in her performance,” Gopi says. “That made people doubt if Sindhu would be able to make it big. A lot of people started comparing her with Saina.”

But deep within his heart, says Gopi, he knew that she’d get a big, big medal and become a big, big player. “It was perhaps both my instinct and God’s will that I kept my faith in her,” he says.

Good pupil

And Sindhu behaved like an ideal pupil. Gopi is the man who refused big money to advertise colas when he was an active player — he knew that that stuff is junk, not fit to be consumed by human beings, and certainly not by elite athletes. “Main uski plate se joh bhi aisa khaana tha, woh nikaal diya (I used to remove this kind of food from her plate),” says Gopi with a grin. “And she never put it back again.”

On her part, Sindhu said that she was grateful to Gopi and the other coaches and support staff. “They worked hard for me,” she said. “I’d like to thank my coaches and support staff, and my parents.”

Gopi said both the Olympics medals won under his coaching, by Saina in 2012 and Sindhu in 2016, are important. “The bronze was the first, and that was very important,” he said. “This (Rio) medal was also needed by the country more than anything, and so it is important too. We also needed it badly, as did Sindhu, for her confidence. And I’m happy that this is off our back.”

Badminton and Indian fans are in a happy state, too.