New Delhi, Jan 21(Agency) Chief National Coach for the India national Badminton team Pullela Gopichand has highlighted how availability of better equipment for Indian Badminton players has helped in improving their performance in the recent years. While speaking at the press conference organised by Yonex-Sunrise for announcing Yonex’s new manufacturing unit in Bengaluru he explained the challenges faced by players in earlier times due to non accessibility to international standard equipment“back in 1991-92 we had a lot of challenges playing the sport, one of the biggest challenges was getting equipment, we all would struggle as we were playing with shuttles which were made locally, these had a different trajectory to the ones that were used internationally, we would even miss scuttles when we played abroad as they would move in a different manner” he said.
The Padma Bhushan awardee felt that as India’s economy opened up access to better equipment was possible for the players “Luckily with India opening up, manufacturers like Yonex came to India which made a huge difference for us because now equipment was readily available for us, we were getting rackets, shuttles and shoes which raised the standard of Indian Badminton.” He pointed out the importance of domestic manufacture of world class equipment for the growth of the sport in the countrty “In the last few years I have been saying that our dependency on imports is something that makes us unsure about our future with the new Yonex manufacturing facility coming up we would have equipment available to us cheaper and also, I wish some day we are going to export much more than the other Yonex factories in the world.” Gopichand noted how Indian Badminton has made rapid strides in recent times “Despite the achievements of some phenomenal players like Prahash Padukone sir and some other individual talents the overall standard of Indian badminton was pretty low, so low that in 1994 India did not even send a team to the Auckland Commonwealth Games because it was felt that the Indian team did not have a chance to be among the top 8 teams, this is where we were in 1994.
Compared to this what we have achieved at the Thomas Cup (in 2022), it is remarkable, a total turnaround for Indian badminton, in 2001 I was lucky to win the All England Open Badminton Championships. Whether it be the 2008 Olympics where for the first time an Indian player reached the quarter finals, 2010 Common Wealth Games when we had our best performance, in 2012 when India won its first bronze medal at the Olympics, in 2014 when we won our first men’s singles Commonwealth Medal, or 2016 when we won the first Olympic silver medal, I think Indian Badminton has moved step by step over the last few years, so much so that last 10 years consistently we have medals at every world championships.”