The man who mortgaged his house to build India’s badminton champions

Let's be honest. In India, badminton has always had to fight for attention. Cricket gets the stadiums, the sponsors, the prime-time slots and, on a good day, the mood of the entire country. Badminton gets whatever's left over.

Now picture yourself trying to raise crores for a badminton academy in that India. It isn't a cricket ground, and it definitely isn't a business with a neat payback plan. It's a building where kids will spend years chasing a shuttlecock, on the off chance that one of them turns out to be special.

One more detail. You're one of the best players the country has ever produced. You've won your sport's biggest tournament. You live in a nice house in Jubilee Hills, one of Hyderabad's poshest areas.

And you mortgage that house for a ₹3 crore loan, so you can finish building courts for kids nobody has heard of yet.

Sounds a bit mad, right? That's exactly what Pullela Gopichand did. If you can name an Indian badminton player from the last fifteen years, there's a good chance they trained in the building that loan helped finish.

So what makes someone bet their home on other people's success? To figure that out, we have to start with a guy and his very bad knee.

A guy and his very bad knee

Gopichand was born in 1973 in Nagandla, a small village in Andhra Pradesh's Prakasam district. He grew up in Hyderabad and later moved to Bengaluru to train under Prakash Padukone, who in 1980 had become the first Indian to win the All England.

His body didn't make any of this easy. He tore a knee ligament in 1994, and by 2001 he'd been operated on three times in four years. So when he turned up at the 2001 All England Championships, nobody had him down as a contender.

If you don't follow badminton, the All England is basically its Wimbledon. It's the oldest tournament in the sport, and for decades it was the one every player wanted most. Gopichand came in seeded tenth. Then he knocked out the reigning Olympic champion, Ji Xinpeng. Then he beat the world number one, Peter Gade.

In the final, on 11 March 2001, he beat China's Chen Hong 15-12, 15-6. He didn't lose a single game all tournament. India had waited 21 years for that moment.

Soon after the win, a soft drink company came calling with a big endorsement deal. He turned it down. His reason was pretty simple: he didn't drink fizzy drinks himself, so why would he want a kid to start because of him? Keep that stubborn streak in mind. You'll see it again.

The night he mortgaged the house

With his knees giving up and his playing days running out, Gopichand started thinking about coaching. And the more he thought about it, the more obvious the gap looked.

Back when he was playing, he'd gone abroad looking for decent places to train. Sometimes he was turned away at the door, because coaches there didn't want an outsider figuring out how their system worked. He later said he wished India had a place of its own, so our players wouldn't have to beg.

In 2003, the Andhra Pradesh government gave him five acres in Gachibowli, Hyderabad, on a 45-year lease at a token rent. Great start. Small problem: land doesn't come with courts, a gym or a roof.

So he went knocking on doors, hoping an All England title would be enough to bring sponsors in. Some help did come. Yonex and a few other companies chipped in, and the biggest chunk came from Nimmagadda Prasad, an industrialist and a relative, who put in a little under ₹6 crore. But it still wasn't enough, and the project kept dragging on.

Gopichand has talked about the night it all came to a head. A company chairman in Mumbai had promised him funding. When Gopichand went to collect it, the company's finance chief made him wait outside the office for three days. Then he told Gopichand that badminton would never pull the eyeballs to be a top sport, and that only good players can be good coaches. Indians, in other words, need not apply.

Gopichand went home that night and decided to put up his house. With his parents and his wife backing him, the family mortgaged their home in Jubilee Hills. The loan came to ₹3 crore, and it was enough to get the academy over the line.

The Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy opened in 2008. It was modelled on the Prakash Padukone academy in Bengaluru, the same place where Gopichand himself had once trained. Bit of a full-circle moment, isn't it?

To be fair, this wasn't a blind leap. He had the land, a big donor and a famous name. Still, putting your family home on the line for a badminton academy, in a country that lived and breathed cricket, takes a special kind of nerve.

Coaching before the courts

The funny thing is, Gopichand didn't wait for the building before he started coaching.

In 2003, while he was still nursing injuries, he ran a 45-day summer camp and took a bunch of kids through the basics. He liked them so much that in April 2004, before he had a sponsor or a finished academy, he started his first proper batch of 25 trainees at the nearby Gachibowli Indoor Stadium. His logic? He'd find talented kids again in three years, but this particular group would be gone by then.

And what a group it was. Parupalli Kashyap was the oldest, at 17. The youngest was an eight-year-old girl named PV Sindhu. Saina Nehwal was in there too, along with Gurusai Datt and Sumeeth Reddy.

Sindhu's father has described driving her in every morning from Marredpally, about 25 km away, and getting her to the courts by 4:30 am. Day after day. Families made trips like that because there was simply nowhere else in India quite like what Gopichand was building.

Then the medals came

Then the results started rolling in.

In 2012, Saina won bronze in London, India's first ever Olympic medal in badminton. Four years later in Rio, Sindhu went one better with silver, the first Olympic silver ever won by an Indian woman. Kashyap, Kidambi Srikanth, B Sai Praneeth and others went on to win big international titles too.

After Sindhu's silver, the academy's phones wouldn't stop ringing. Parents from all over the country wanted to know how to get their kids in. A sport most Indian families thought of as a Sunday-morning hobby suddenly looked like a real career.

Honestly, that might be the biggest win of the lot. Medals make people dream. An academy gives those dreams somewhere to go.

Discipline is the whole personality

Now, if you're picturing Gopichand as a soft, encouraging sort of coach, think again. Discipline is pretty much his whole personality.

He was usually the first one at the academy, around 4 am. Before Rio, he took Sindhu's phone away for about three months so she could focus. Chocolates and Hyderabadi biryani, two of her favourite things, were off the menu. In the build-up to the Games, he was reportedly getting up at 2 am every day to go over videos of her matches and hunt for mistakes.

But he also knew he couldn't do everything himself. Sindhu is 179 cm tall, which is great for reach but makes moving quickly harder. So he brought in fitness trainers to build up her legs and her speed around the court.

Of course, a strict system doesn't suit everyone. In 2014, Saina left the academy and moved to Bengaluru to train under Vimal Kumar. She reportedly felt she wasn't getting enough attention, right when Sindhu was on the rise. Under Vimal Kumar, she went on to become world number one. Gopichand later admitted the split really hurt. Three years later, in 2017, Saina came back.

One man, or what he built?

Which raises a fair question. Is the academy great because of one man, or because of what he built? Here's a hint. By the time Sindhu won bronze in Tokyo, she had moved out of the academy and was training with South Korea's Park Tae-sang. But the player standing on that podium had been shaped by more than a decade in Gopichand's halls. The coach had changed. The foundation hadn't.

What sticks with me about Gopichand's story isn't really the money, the building or even the medals.

It's what he chose to do after he'd already made it. He had proved an Indian could beat the best in the world. He had the trophy. He could have stopped right there. Instead, he poured his savings, his early mornings and his family home into making sure the next Indian wouldn't need three knee surgeries, a miracle run and a trip abroad to do the same thing.

So the next time an Indian shuttler lifts a trophy, spare a thought for a house in Jubilee Hills. Somewhere in that win is a ₹3 crore loan, taken out by a man who got tired of waiting for someone else to build the courts.