🇮🇳 Saina Nehwal

Saina Nehwal was born on 17 March 1990 in Hisar, Haryana, to a family of badminton players: her father Harvir Singh worked at the Choudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University and had been a state-level badminton player; her mother Usha Rani had been a state women's champion in the late 1970s. The family moved to Hyderabad when Saina was nine; her father commuted four hours a day on a scooter to drop her at the Lal Bahadur Stadium for 5 a.m. coaching sessions with Syed Mohammed Arif, a national coach who had been impressed by the eight-year-old's footwork during a holiday tournament. The family lived, in those years, on a tight government salary; the badminton training expenses ate nearly half of it.

She won the World Junior Championship in 2008 at the age of eighteen — the first Indian to do so. Her senior breakthrough came in 2009, when she became the first Indian woman to reach the singles quarterfinal at an Olympics (Beijing 2008). She turned professional under the legendary coach Pullela Gopichand at the Gopichand Academy in Hyderabad, where she trained alongside the eventual generation of Indian badminton talent: PV Sindhu, Parupalli Kashyap (whom she would later marry), Srikanth Kidambi. The academy, which Gopichand had funded by mortgaging his house, was the institutional revolution that made Indian badminton viable at world level. Saina was, in essence, its first product.

The 2012 London Olympics bronze made her a national figure. She came home to a felicitation by the President of India, a Padma Bhushan, and offers from every major Indian corporate. She took the next four years to build on the Olympic medal: she won the Indian Open, the China Masters Super Series, the Australian Open, and reached the final of the 2015 All England Open — the first Indian woman ever to do so, losing to Carolina Marín. In April 2015 she reached World No. 1 in the BWF rankings — the only Indian woman ever to hold the top badminton ranking. She was, for a brief window in mid-2015, the dominant women's singles player on earth.

The injury arrived at the 2016 Rio Olympics in the worst possible week: a knee meniscus tear during the group stage. She finished her matches in tears, lost in the second round, and was told by her surgeons in Mumbai that the cartilage damage was severe enough that 'she might not return at the same level.' She had surgery five weeks later. She did not play for nine months. The Indian badminton press, which had been worshipful, became conditional: would she return? Would she return at the same level? Would she retire? Saina, asked these questions repeatedly in 2017, gave the same answer each time: 'I will return. Whether at the same level is for the court to decide, not for me.'

She returned at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast and won the gold medal. She returned in 2019 to win the Indonesia Masters. She reached the Asian Games quarterfinals in 2018. She did not, in the end, regain the World No. 1 ranking — but she remained inside the top 20 until 2022, at the age of 32, when she announced an indefinite break to rehabilitate her knee for what she said would be 'one more clean season.' She returned briefly in 2024, won a single Super 100 title in Vietnam, and retired at the end of that calendar year. She is married to Parupalli Kashyap, with whom she lives in Hyderabad and runs a sports management consultancy.

She is, in May 2026, 36 years old. She continues to be the face of Indian badminton in advertising and on talk shows; her transition into post-career work has been graceful and structurally important. She has become the chief mentor at the Saina Nehwal Sports Academy in Hisar, which she founded in 2023 with her own funds. The London 2012 bronze medal sits in the academy's front lobby, in a glass case, with a small handwritten card that reads, in Saina's own handwriting: 'I was 22 when I won this. You are watching this medal because someone older than me told me, when I was your age, that I could win it.' The card has been photographed by every visiting parent in Hisar for three years.