Exclusive! Pullela Gopichand reveals mother’s push to rekindle coaching career
Pullela Gopichand contemplated leaving coaching after Saina Nehwal’s Olympic bronze in 2012 but his mother inspired him to continue.
When All England champion Pullela Gopichand began his coaching journey in 2004, his ultimate aim was to produce an Olympic medallist and make India a force on the global stage.
He finally achieved it at the 2012 Beijing Olympics, when
Saina Nehwal won bronze in the women’s singles and became India’s first Olympic medallist in badminton.
It was a dream come true for the nation but was even more significant for Pullela Gopichand. The bronze medal was the result of years of hard work and dedication towards coaching the next generation.
Naturally, Pullela Gopichand felt that he had achieved what he had set out to and wondered if he should stop coaching.
“When we won that medal in 2012, it almost felt like I was done. I felt I had had enough of this,” Gopichand said in the Olympic Channel’s new show The Academy: Forging India’s Badminton Champions.
“I actually had a conversation with my mother about it. I asked her if what I had done was enough. She was very kind initially, but the next morning she asked me what I was still doing in the house and asked me to go to the academy,” laughed Gopichand.
Pullela Gopichand’s mother Pullela Subbaravamma, for her part, knew what her son had set to achieve and wanted him to continue making the country proud,
“We were so happy when we won the medal - because the country was waiting for it, the academy and all of us were waiting for it,” Subbaravamma said in the show.
“Getting Olympic medals was the motivation for building that academy. So, I always told Gopi that one medal is not enough, I want more and more medallists from our academy.”
Pullela Gopichand did continue to coach and the decision was vindicated four years later when PV Sindhu won the silver medal in her Olympics debut at Rio 2016. Sindhu has since gone on to become India’s first BWF World Championship winner.
The Academy: Forging India’s Badminton Champions is a six-episode original series created by the Olympic Channel.
It goes behind the scenes at the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy in Hyderabad, India, for an inside look at the facility that has produced two Olympic medallists and is widely credited with establishing India among the badminton elite.
You can watch all the episodes here.