Saina Nehwal Won Bronze at Wembley Arena on 4 August 2012, India's First Olympic Badminton Medal, and Became the First Indian Woman to Reach World No. 1 in 2015

Saina Nehwal won the women’s singles bronze medal at the London Olympics on 4 August 2012, the first Olympic medal India has won in badminton. At Wembley Arena the match ended when China’s Wang Xin, the second seed, retired with a knee injury after winning the first game 21-18 and scoring the first point of the second. AFP reported that Nehwal became only the second Indian woman, after Karnam Malleswari, to win an Olympic medal. It was India’s third medal of those Games, after Gagan Narang’s bronze in the 10 m air rifle and Vijay Kumar’s silver in the 25 m rapid fire pistol.

On 2 April 2015 the Badminton World Federation (BWF) published a ranking list that made her the first Indian woman to be world number one in singles, the Badminton Association of India said. What follows is the record from her 2012 draw to the titles and honours that came after.

From Hisar to the fourth seeding

Olympedia, the Games database, lists Nehwal as born on 17 March 1990 in Hisar, Haryana. AFP and IANS reports call her a Hyderabadi, and Herald Goa describes Pullela Gopichand, an All England champion himself, as her mentor and former coach. Herald Goa also lists her as the first Indian to win the BWF World Junior Championships and the first Indian to win a Super Series event, the Indonesia Open of 2009. SheThePeople’s career summary says the same of the 2009 title.

Beijing 2008 was her first Olympics, and Olympedia records a joint fifth place there, which means a quarter-final exit. By London she was seeded fourth. China dominated the field: Olympedia notes that Wang Yihan had been ranked first in the world since October 2009, with Wang Xin second and Li Xuerui third, and that the Chinese players won every group match they played.

Six matches to the podium

Olympedia’s bracket gives the sequence. In the group stage she beat Switzerland’s Sabrina Jaquet on 29 July and Belgium’s Lianne Tan on 30 July, both in straight games, finishing on 84 points to her opponents’ 31. Jie Yao of the Netherlands went out in straight games in the round of 16 on 1 August.

Her quarter-final on 2 August was against Tine Baun of Denmark, the fifth seed, and she won 21-15, 22-20, according to the Tribune’s report, which called her the first Indian shuttler to reach the Olympic semi-finals. Against Wang Yihan, the top seed, on 3 August, she lost 21-13, 21-13 in 42 minutes, as the Tribune and Olympedia both record. Wang then lost the final to Li Xuerui, 21-15, 21-23, 21-17. Nehwal and Wang Xin, the two beaten semi-finalists, met for the bronze the next afternoon.

The bronze match

The AFP account in the Gulf Times gives the shape of the match. Defensive shots opened Nehwal’s first game, Wang Xin levelled at 5-5 and then controlled it, and at 20-14 the Chinese player held six game points. Nehwal saved four of them to make it 18-20. Then Wang landed heavily on a smash and fell. The referee called a medical time-out, the tournament doctor treated her right knee, and she came back with it strapped and closed out the first game 21-18.

Wang won the first point of the second game and went down again. Nehwal walked across the court to comfort her, and when Wang could not continue the match was awarded to Nehwal at 0-1 in the second game.

How the ending was read at the time

According to Olympedia’s event summary, Wang Xin’s teammates and many observers felt she would have won had the match run its course, and Nehwal was confident she had been wearing her opponent down. The Tribune’s Rohit Mahajan wrote from London that something seemed not quite right about the way the medal came, since Nehwal had lost the first game and trailed in the second, then examined how the match had gone and concluded that the right player got the medal. Nehwal told the Tribune she felt sorry for Wang.

Number one in 2015

Earlier titles had set the pattern. At the Delhi Commonwealth Games in October 2010, ranked third in the world, Nehwal beat Malaysia’s Wong Mew Choo 19-21, 23-21, 21-13 in the women’s singles final, as the AP report in Dawn records. She dropped the first game and was trailing for most of the second.

The route to the top ranking ran through the India Open Super Series in New Delhi. The title came on 29 March 2015, a day after Spain’s Carolina Marin lost her semi-final to Thailand’s Ratchanok Intanon, 19-21, 23-21, 20-22. That result left Nehwal assured of the top place, according to the Badminton Association of India, and the BWF ranking list of Thursday 2 April made it official. She was the second Indian to hold a world number one ranking, after Prakash Padukone, the federation noted.

In IANS remarks published by The News Minute on 31 March 2015, Nehwal said she had been in the world top five for seven years and had been second three times. She had thought of quitting after the previous year’s World Championships, she said, then moved to Bangalore, where her coach Vimal Kumar set a target of number one by May. She reached it in March.

In August she played the final of the World Championships in Jakarta. On 16 August 2015 Marin beat her 21-16, 21-19, as AFP and BadmintonPlanet both reported. AFP described Nehwal as the first Indian to reach a world championship final.

Honours on the record

Official lists carry three awards. The Padma Awards notification for 2010 gives Saina Nehwal, Sports, Andhra Pradesh, under the Padma Shri, and the Sports Authority of India’s list of Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna awardees puts her name against 2010. A President’s Secretariat notification dated 28 March 2016 lists “Ms. Saina Nehwal, Sports, Telangana” among the Padma Bhushan awardees.

Gold Coast, 2018

The BWF report of the 2018 Commonwealth Games finals says the women’s singles final at Gold Coast on 15 April 2018 was all-Indian. Nehwal, then 28, beat Pusarla V. Sindhu, six years her junior, 21-18, 23-21, for her second individual Commonwealth Games gold after the 2010 title. Gopichand, India’s head coach, named “Saina and Sindhu in the Women’s Singles final” among the team’s good performances, the BWF quoted him as saying.

Sindhu went on to win two Olympic medals, which tuput’s profile of P. V. Sindhu sets out. Olympedia’s page for Nehwal lists Commonwealth medals as team mixed bronze in 2006, singles gold and team mixed silver in 2010, and singles gold and team mixed gold in 2018, plus Asian Games bronze medals in the 2014 team event and the 2018 singles. It credits her with one Olympic medal across three Games: joint fifth in 2008, bronze in 2012 and joint 14th in 2016.