Battle-ready: Ace Shuttler PV Sindhu eyes third consecutive Olympic medal

No Indian player has won three Olympic medals on the trot and a podium finish will make Sindhu arguably India's greatest athlete

Paris: From spending time in a hypoxic chamber to sparring with a variety of partners to adapt to different styles, Indian badminton ace PV Sindhu has left no stones unturned to be battle-ready for the Paris Games, where she will be chasing an unprecedented third consecutive Olympic medal.

Sindhu’s form has been patchy of late but she says the hat-trick of medals is very much possible because the last eight months spent with mentor Prakash Padukone has instilled confidence in her.

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No Indian player has won three Olympic medals on the trot and a podium finish will make Sindhu arguably India’s greatest athlete. “I am aiming for a medal, definitely, yes. Whether it’s one or two or three, it doesn’t matter. I’ve won two medals and I don’t want to take pressure by thinking that, oh, what is the third one,” she said after a training session at Porte de la Chapelle Arena here.

“Every time I play Olympics, it’s a new Olympics for me. So every time I go out there, I want to get a medal and hopefully, I will do that hat trick soon.” Sindhu had won silver and bronze in the last two Olympics at Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo respectively. Before coming to Paris, Sindhu trained at Sportcampus Saar in Saarbrucken, Germany where the altitude, the weather, and the conditions are similar to the French capital.

There she created a hypoxic chamber (low oxygen) in her room and slept for a couple of days. Hypoxic chambers help prepare an athlete’s body to function at higher-altitude places. “I couldn’t go to the high altitude training center. I didn’t have much time and obviously, there I couldn’t have been playing. So I just thought, it would be good for me instead of going somewhere, getting it here and doing some changes and sleeping that way,” she explained.

So, if the conditions demand the maximum from an athlete, with such training they feel ready to negotiate the challenge. Sindhu said she has improved her strokes and is more consistent during the long rallies. “Being much more confident in strokes,” she replied when asked what difference she finds after training with Padukone.