Expectations don’t put me under pressure: Sindhu
PV Sindhu is as much at ease while fielding ticklish queries as she is while returning fierce smashes. In fact, she is not known for taking evasive action be it on court in front of a jam-packed arena or in a dingy room in the presence of inquisitive scribes trying to put her on the spot with a fusillade of questions.
By : migrator
Update: 2020-01-21 20:40 GMT
Chennai
Sindhu is in the city representing Hyderabad Hunters in the Premier Badminton League and went about answering each of the questions with disarming felicity that wasn’t lost on those present. As is the wont, the Q&A session got underway by making polite inquiries about her current physical well-being before turning attention to the more pressing issues at hand.
With 2020 being the year of Olympics, understandably the talk centred on her preparation for the quadrennial event and how she is planning to deal with a multitude of challenges that are strewn in her path from now until she boards the flight bound for Tokyo.
Ever since she won the World Championships last year, things haven’t exactly panned out the way she would have envisaged with a slew of early exits not doing justice to her ranking perched as she is atop the food chain.
Had those mishaps occurred in a non-Olympic year, they wouldn’t have caused much alarm other than raising a few eyebrows and even fewer whispers of her predicament. But given the hype that surrounds the Olympics, and justifiably so, even the uninitiated have started painting a depressing picture of her medal-winning prospects.
Sindhu, as one would expect, has refused to buy into those gloomy prognoses and quashed any talk of her supremacy being on the wane. She reckons that the dip in her performance is merely a temporary setback on her path to eternal glory.
Excerpts:
On how her life changed post Rio Olympics:
It has changed a lot. I won a lot of matches and lost some. I have been improving step by step. Not much was expected of me when I went to Rio, but now people expect a gold medal from me. I look at it in a positive way when everyone expects me to do well. I don’t consider that as added pressure and that will only make me work even harder.
On working on her psyche: I have been constantly working on improving my mental fitness. There have been close matches in the past where I won and some that I lost. It’s important to be in a positive frame of mind and come back stronger and rectify the mistakes.
On what PBL means to her: We get to play with top quality players in PBL like Tai Tzu Ying which is helpful in an Olympic-year. We get to learn a lot from the foreign players who come up with useful inputs. Even I get to improve some aspects of my game by interacting with foreign talent. There is a lot of time before the Olympics. For now, my focus is on helping my team in the PBL.
On the young talent coming up: The PBL is a great platform for youngsters like Lakshya Sen. For Priyanshu, it was his first match on such a big stage and he played well. It’s a good exposure for the younger crop because they get to learn a lot more from the senior pros. It’s a learning process and they will get more familiar with high-pressure matches. This tournament helps in team-bonding as you don’t play for yourself like in other events but you play for the team.
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