Saina Nehwal chuckled when asked if the 3×15 scoring system, set to come into force from January 2027, could tempt her to return to the badminton court.

In theory, Saina, at least at her peak, would have revelled in this abridged format. Her natural attacking flair, speed and ability to close out games would have made her a neat fit.

While this could make for a good debate over coffee, the reality is quite different. At 36, and having gone through the intense grind of the professional tour for nearly two decades, Saina is unable to meet the physical demands of the sport.

“I wish I could come back, but I have total cartilage damage,” she said during a virtual interaction. “My knee is in a seriously bad shape. I cannot push for more than half an hour. But yes, I really do want to play.”

Saina believes that her contemporary P.V. Sindhu will benefit from the new rules. Sindhu, 31, maybe in the final stages of her career, but has plenty of fight left. In July, the double Olympic medallist served a reminder of her class by becoming the first Indian to win the Japan Open.

Merits and demerits

“The good thing is that Sindhu has the best physiotherapist and trainer. This is really helpful. Her court movement is very good,” Saina observed.

“From next year, when the points system shifts to 3×15, matches will get shorter. You will get a lot of recovery time between fixtures. There are big breaks between Super 1000 tournaments too, which guarantees good rest periods.

“Careers will extend longer because the matches are shorter. Any player can win tournaments in that scenario,” the two-time World championships medallist added.

Saina, the first Indian woman to reach the summit in the World rankings, added a note of caution regarding training regimens.

“The new scoring system will tilt the game towards power and speed. But when you train for power and speed, chances of getting injured are higher. If Sindhu can take care to avoid injuries, she can play for a long time,” she opined.

Looking at the talent that has emerged after Saina and Sindhu, there remains a gap in quality. The likes of Unnati Hooda and Tanvi Sharma have registered some impressive wins, but are not yet world-beaters in the class of their seniors.

“In terms of attitude and skill, Tanvi and Unnati have a very bright future. They have gained experience and produced results. Devika [Sihag] and the other players need to improve a bit more.

“There are challenges – how do you make a comeback from a loss? How much do you train on a regular basis? Are you ready to push yourself and not give up? As far as I have seen, Tanvi and Unnati don’t give up. They keep fighting. They have the best coaches too. Tanvi is training under Park [Tae-sang], while Unnati is training with her father,” Saina stated.

As for the best in the world, Saina rates 2024 Paris Olympics gold medallist An Se-young as a “once in a generation” player. She had taken on the South Korean when the latter was a promising youngster, sharing the spoils with a 1-1 head-to-head record.

“An can rally very well, and the improvement now is that she dives well to pick up shots. She has also improved the speed of strokes. She is not the fastest player, but she has fast strokes and her court coverage is very smooth,” Saina said.

And then there is the 24-year-old’s intense drive – a trait Saina views as key.

“Even after having won the Olympic gold and so many titles, you can still see that hunger to win. When she lost recently, you saw her crying. A player with that sort of desire is tough to defeat.”

Against the odds

The 2012 London Olympics bronze medallist is of the opinion that with cricket taking centrestage in India, athletes in other sports must stay at an elite level to gain recognition.

“In India, the problem is that if you perform in any sport apart from cricket, you don’t get much importance unless you win tournaments. Tanvi and Unnati have won tournaments, and that’s why everyone is talking about them. You have to show results and win consistently. That is when you get popular in this country.”

Saina, who is serving on the expert panel of Sony Sports Network for its coverage of the 2026 Asian Games, is hopeful that the hype around the Indian cricket teams will not overshadow other disciplines at the multi-sport extravaganza.

“I will be happy as long as medal winners from other sports are [also] celebrated. We expect the Indian cricket team to win medals at the Asian Games and the Olympics. But this could mean that medallists from other sports might feel bad if they don’t receive the same encouragement as the cricketers.

“I have a feeling that [even] if they (non-cricket sportspersons) win a gold medal, they will get sidelined. In that scenario, I will feel bad because only cricket gets the support,” Saina explained.

The Padma Bhushan awardee reflected on the challenges she faced during her playing career, especially when it came to getting the attention of the general public.

“I had to win multiple Super Series titles in a year to be there [in the spotlight]. Just one Super Series victory was not enough. I had the motivation to win an Olympic medal, and to become the World No. 1. The victories helped me appear in newspapers, and people started to notice me.”

Guts and glory

Her groundbreaking achievements were marked by self-improvement and dedication to the sport.

“I worked on improving myself every day – listening to my coaches, thinking about how to prepare for the next tournament, staying injury-free… I had big goals for myself, which is why I was able to win at Super Series events and the World championships,” Saina stated.

“Having said that, I also feel sad that after winning 24 international titles and an Olympic medal, many people confuse me with tennis player Sania Mirza.

“I am sure that about 70 to 80% of girls in India do not know anything about the world of sports. We have to find out how we can promote sports. I am not against cricket, but other sports cann ever overtake cricket unless athletes keep winning at the highest level.”

Saina emphasised the role of a stable support system, starting with good parenting.

“To win even a couple of Super Series tournaments is very, very challenging for Indian players. If there is no financial support, we should not expect to win a single title.

“When my parents took the risk to support my badminton dreams, they did not think much about the great financial rewards I may get. They just wholeheartedly supported me, and luckily I could come back with so many good results. But how many parents can do this? It’s not that easy.”

The year was 2009. Denmark and Macau walked away from their bids to host the BWF World championships. The opportunity fell into India’s lap. Hyderabad had no clue at the time that it was about to stage the opening scene of a story that would take 17 years to finish telling.

In 2009, the country did not have the cast of characters to make a home World championships a triumph. Badminton had only flickered across the Indian imagination during Prakash Padukone’s All England title in 1980 and P. Gopi Chand’s echoing of it 21 years later — stray flares in a long darkness.

Humble beginnings

Saina Nehwal was the closest thing to a rising star. Aged 19 then, she had just become the first Indian woman to win the World junior championship and the first Indian to claim a Super Series title. The Olympic medal and No. 1 ranking were still years away. P.V. Sindhu was 14.

There was no Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) funding. Corporate India didn’t see a reason to cut a cheque. Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ) was in its early stages.

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Saina’s quarterfinal finish at the 2008 Beijing Olympics caught the nation’s attention but the machinery beneath the sport hadn’t caught up to the moment. When the Worlds came to Hyderabad in 2009, the money just wasn’t there.

Gopi Chand himself went door to door, hat in hand, trying to talk India Inc. into caring. Yonex’s entire sponsorship contribution was around 200 boxes of shuttlecocks. Government support was barely a whisper. The multi-purpose Gachibowli indoor stadium became the stage, and the crew running it were young players — and sometimes their parents — pressed into service.

“We hosted a bunch of events in that period. Nationals [2004], Asian championships [2005], India Open [2008 and 2009], and the World championships, after which the Commonwealth Games infrastructure was created in Delhi. We had our challenges, but we hosted a grand event. People still talk about it in Hyderabad,” Gopi Chand recalled.

H.S. Prannoy, a volunteer in 2009, put the improbability of it more bluntly.

“Badminton wasn’t popular then, so people were hesitant to sponsor it. I remember hearing a lot about Gopi sir doing the rounds to ask for sponsorships. But I don’t think there was even one complaint about the event. To pull it off the way they did was spectacular,” he said.

“We were all there at that time as volunteers, helping arrange small things. But the one thing we all remember is that we got a chance to watch guys like Lin Dan and Lee Chong Wei up close — which, back then, was almost impossible! The confidence and motivation you get from seeing them live propelled me for the next couple of years.”

ALSO READ | Gopi Chand: “Horizons much bigger for the present players”

The tournament came off without a hitch. And yet India finished empty-handed, still stuck on the single bronze Padukone won in 1983.

Seventeen years later, the Worlds return to a country that no longer merely makes up the numbers. It now expects to be standing on the podium, and usually is. Fourteen medals have arrived in the years since, spread across every discipline but mixed doubles, crowned by Sindhu’s gold in 2019.

Ask what lit the fuse on all of it, Saina’s run at the 2008 Olympics and her bronze four years later in London take centre stage for many.

The spark

“Saina’s performance in 2008 was probably the spark, but the 2012 medal was what really changed things from a funding perspective. Before that, we used to think it was only the Indonesians and Chinese who could medal at these big events. When Saina won, everyone had hope that if she could win one, maybe we could too,” Prannoy said.

“I don’t think there’s been one singular turning point, honestly,” Gopi Chand differed. “My winning the All England was big. Without it, the idea of the academy and the belief that Indians could win at the highest stage wouldn’t have come. Then Saina’s win was the moment Indian women started to believe they could win.”

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Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa took the Worlds bronze in 2011, snapping a 28-year drought. A year later, Saina clinched India’s maiden Olympic medal in badminton. By 2015, she had topped the world rankings — the first Indian woman to do so — and claimed the country’s first Worlds silver. Sindhu then walked through the door that had been kicked open, and Indian badminton never looked back.

But medals aren’t the only measure of evolution.

“In 2008, I remember tournaments being cancelled for lack of entries. Today, we hosted an Under-17 event with 4,200 entries at the national level. The sport now needs — and has — a much larger official setup,” Gopi Chand explained.

Ayush Shetty, one of India’s most promising young talents, has seen the winds change at the grassroots. “I didn’t have the support system a 14-year-old has now when I was that age. You have physios, trainers, and everything else now. Back in my day, I didn’t know much about recovery, it was all about working hard only.”

Corporate India slowly began embracing the sport. Money came, infrastructure followed.

Sindhu, now the face of badminton rather than a kid running around in the stands, points to a support system that simply didn’t exist for her predecessors. “OGQ has been backing me since I was 14, when I was still a junior and not even on the senior circuit. That kind of support in the starting stages is very important!”

“Now BAI has its own academy in Guwahati,” BAI general secretary Sanjay Mishra noted. “We have sponsors like Yonex [title sponsor of the 2026 edition]. In 2009, we had just four to five senior ranking tournaments. Now we have 30 to 32 tournaments a year across different levels. It’s a clear reflection of the sport’s popularity.”

Not every experiment survived the journey, though.

ALSO READ | “I’m not ready to give up the torch” – Prannoy isn’t planning to fade away just yet

The Indian Badminton League, later rebranded the Premier Badminton League, briefly turned the sport into a televised, commercial entity, only to buckle under the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, undone less by the lack of appetite than by a pile-up of logistics, an overcrowded international calendar, and commercial disagreements behind the scenes.

Government investment, however, firmed up and brought Indian badminton something 2009 never had: depth. Where the country once staked everything on a single Padukone- or Gopi Chand-shaped miracle, it now walks into a World championships with waves of match-winners. If the singles medal doesn’t come, the doubles might deliver instead.

The scale of change

That, more than anything, is the real distance between 2009 and 2026, and it has demanded 17 years of quiet, unglamorous institution-building. Real academies now stand where one man’s mortgaged house once did. A queue of contenders has replaced the single name carrying an entire nation’s hopes.

The real ambition now isn’t one champion every generation but ten players in contention at once, so that whoever wins, India wins.

Hyderabad asked the country to believe. Delhi is proof that it was right to.

Gopi Chand played his part in the rise of stars such as Kashyap, Srikanth and Sindhu.
| Photo Credit: File photo: Getty Images