2020 - The year of hope for Indian Olympic sports

Badminton

P V Sindhu

India will hope to have representation in all the 5 badminton events at the 2020 Olympics. But two of India's star badminton players, Saina Nehwal and Kidambi Srikanth are struggling to make it to the Olympics since injuries and bad form have impacted their rankings adversely.

PV Sindhu will be our biggest medal hope in badminton. She became the first Indian to win a World Championship Gold medal in 2019. Her performance during the tournament was outstanding with wins over the top players in the world including Tai Tzu-Ying in the quarterfinals, Chen Yufei in the semifinals and Nozomi Okuhara in the final. Although the rest of the year was not that good for her, she is known to raise her game in big tournaments which is clearly evident by the Olympics medal and 5 World Championship medals. With her dedication and focus before the big events and Gopichand's guidance, we can surely hope that she would be able to convert her previous Olympics' Silver to a Gold this time round.

Apart from Sindhu, we also have an outside chance of a medal in men’s singles (with Sai Praneeth winning a Bronze at the World Championship) and men’s doubles (with Satwik Sairaj and Chirag Shetty’s commendable performances in the 2nd half of 2019).