A mere eight months ago, Saina Nehwal was contemplating retirement from badminton after suffering a routine loss to Chinese top seed Liu Xuerui at the World Championships in August.
The Indian star recalls going home to Hyderabad, crying to her parents as she felt helpless against the dominant force of the Chinese in the sport and was becoming more and more vulnerable to her doubters, who were claiming her career was virtually finished.
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Little did those sceptics know, Nehwal would become the first Indian woman to reach No1 in the badminton world rankings just eight months later. After making history for her country by winning Olympic bronze in London 2012 (she was the first Indian to medal in badminton at any Games), Nehwal had a troubling 2013. She won zero titles that year, suffered a toe fracture, and felt that she was losing her game against the very best.
“My mum told me in 2013 ‘You’re not improving and you’re facing some problems. There should be some way out of it. You can’t take the risk of again going to practice the same way then losing, you have to think what is going wrong with you’,” Nehwal told Sport360 on the sidelines of the Shuttle Time Dubai Schools Championship last week.
“At one point it became too much for me. I won the Australia Open (in 2014), I did well in the Thomas & Uber Cup but at the World Championship, it was the same thing again with Liu Xuerui. I lost in straight games. I wasn’t even giving them a tough fight. I was losing easily.
“Finally I told myself ‘that’s enough, it’s not working out anymore’. I cried a lot after that. I’m a human being and you feel bad. I came home and I told my dad ‘I need a change, I think I have to move out of my comfort zone and go to Bangalore and see how it is going to be’.”
Moving from Hyderabad to Bangalore and linking up with coach Vimal Kumar paid dividends rather swiftly. By November, Nehwal had won the China Open, taking down three Chinese scalps en route, and again registering unprecedented success by an Indian player.
“The first 10 days after moving to Bangalore, many people were against me, saying ‘why is Saina doing this? It’s not going to be easy for her now’. So with that criticism, they put a lot of pressure on me that I might not perform well after changing coaches.
“But God has been really kind to me, he gave me that belief that I just have to train and not think about what people are saying,” she said.
“In the Asian Games I lost to Yihan Wang in three games, it was a close match. After that I was giving a very tough fight to the Chinese players and in the China Open I won the tournament, I beat all the Chinese. So the results were coming. I didn’t speak much to anyone. I was like ‘let us see, first let the results come and only then I can say something’. Until I prove it, no one was going to believe it.
“I just waited for my time, did my training, believed in myself. And the confidence that was zero before, Vimal made me really believe. Every day he told me ‘first of all get your confidence back’. Every session he made me feel like a champion.”
Things kept getting better from then on. Last March, the 25-year-old became the first Indian to reach the finals of the prestigious All England Open and followed that up by capturing the India Open title. On April 2, 2015, she was officially world No1.
In a remarkable coincidence, 10 days later, tennis player Sania Mirza became the first Indian woman to be crowned world No1 when she rose to the top of the doubles rankings of the WTA.
While Nehwal and Mirza had their own journey to success, it’s impossible not to notice the similarities between them. Both are trailblazers in India, champions and boast strong personalities. The two icons even speak in a similar tone, exuding confidence and insisting that Indian women are tough and can reach the pinnacle of whatever they set their hearts on.
“Sania is a great player. She also came in the limelight in 2005 and I came up a year after that. There have been a lot of coincidences with Sania, a lot of titles together. What she’s doing for the country is great and finally achieving world No1 status in doubles, doing it together, that’s great,” said Nehwal, currently No2 in the rankings.
“I would now say that women in India will believe, if Saina and Sania can do it, when Mary Kom (five-time World Amateur Boxing champion) can do it, why not we? We’re an inspiration for girls in India. I think after they see our achievements there will be a lot of girls who will want to play sports. Especially the parents, I would like to tell them ‘let your daughters do whatever they want to. We have many engineers, many doctors, many people who study a lot, but we don’t have many sportspersons’.
“We have a lot of talent, it’s just that we don’t want to come out of our comfort zones.”
It’s no surprise Nehwal refers to parents as a crucial factor in an athlete’s career. Her mother and father have played a big role in her development. When she was eight years old, her family moved from north of India to Hyderabad.
Nehwal missed her friends so picked up karate as a way to entertain herself and she became a brown belt. But her heart wasn’t in it and she soon picked up badminton as an alternative.
World number 1 again so happy pic.twitter.com/qrJw6mipbi
— Saina Nehwal (@NSaina) April 16, 2015
“My mum, when I was only nine, told me ‘Saina, you’re going to get an Olympic medal for me’ and I was like ‘please don’t joke with me, I just started playing and you’re telling me to win an Olympic medal’,” laughs Nehwal.
“She was the one who said at that age that I could do it. And finally I have an Olympic medal and she’s like ‘see, if you believe it and really want to achieve it, you can do it’.
“It was like a fairytale I would say, like a dream. Nothing was decided. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a champion someday. I just joined badminton because I wanted to have some fun, I wanted to play sport.”
And that simple notion has transpired into Saina Nehwal, world No1 and history-making Indian champion.
