CHENNAI: For a country that has produced Olympic champion, Commonwealth Games medallists and Asian Games winner in the badminton singles’ category, it is hard to look at potential medal winners in doubles beyond Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty. Even as the Olympic qualification period was recently extended to June 15, Indian doubles shuttlers might not come close to punching their tickets.
This is in contrast to the Rio Olympics, where seven Indian shuttlers including the women’s doubles pair of Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa and men’s pair of Manu Attri and B Sumeeth Reddy participated. With only Satwik and Chirag in a good position for Tokyo Olympics — they are ranked 9th in the Race to Tokyo where the top 16 are eligible former India shuttler Jwala Gutta feels that there is a dearth of doubles specialists in the country.
The former World Championship bronze medallist is of the opinion that the entire doubles ecosystem has to change to produce medallists. “Why are we still banking on just one pair? If we are competing with China, they have four-five players in the draw. We have just one. Has badminton gone up, given that the
players have more exposure now? I think doubles has gone down,” said Jwala on the sidelines of the promotional event of the second edition of Tamil Nadu Badminton Super League in Chennai on Friday.
“The attitude needs to change first. The ecosystem has to be different.” She believes that in order to increase the pool of doubles players at the national level, the federation should identify shuttlers at the sub-junior level, get them under their wings and nurture them. “You have to develop them from the sub-junior level (U-16), tell them if you do well, we will take care of you. You have to give that assurance...not that ‘if you are not good in singles, play doubles’. Everybody thinks you need to put less effort in doubles which is not true. There should be a pool of at least 50 pairs. Getting just five-six pairs will not work.”