Biography
Parupalli Kashyap's badminton career is a story of perseverance, of straining every sinew to extract the maximum possible reward.
At the age of 14, the shuttler was diagnosed with asthma and bouts of dizziness and disorientation affected him on court.
However, as he put it years later, it was ‘not a condition that stops you from living life.’ He lived that up by not only winning a Commonwealth Games gold medal but also reaching the men’s quarter-finals at the Olympics - both significant moments in the history of Indian badminton.
Brought up in Hyderabad, a city that seems to operate an assembly line of top badminton players, Parupalli Kashyap trained under both former All-England champions Prakash Padukone and Pullela Gopichand, the latter eventually becoming his full-time coach.
His first taste of major success came at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, where, incidentally, he was disallowed his regular medication due to a technical rule. Though the Indian badminton star went down in the semi-finals to England’s Rajiv Ouseph, he beat former national champion Chetan Anand and won the bronze medal, his first major international medal. Over the next few years, he would go on to add more trophies to his cabinet.
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