PV Sindhu Debut: When did the ace shuttler first represent India?

Two-time Olympic medalist shuttler PV Sindhu made her international debut in 2009 at the age of 14 in the sub-junior Asian Badminton Championships, starting off with a bronze medal victory in the competition held in Colombo. A year later in 2010, she secured a silver medal at the Iran Fajr International Badminton Challenge in women's singles.

In 2011, she continued her winning momentum, winning the Maldives International Challenge and the Indonesia International Challenge in two consecutive months.

In July 2012, Sindhu emerged as India’s first-ever Asian Junior champion after beating Nozomi Okuhara in the final of the Asian Junior Championships. In 2013, she reached her career-best ranking of 15 and went on to win her first Grand Prix gold title after defeating Singapore's Gu Juan in the Malaysian Grand Prix.

PV Sindhu made her Commonwealth Games debut in 2014, winning the bronze medal in the women’s singles. Four years later at the CWG 2018 in Gold Coast, she bagged the silver and gold medals in the singles and mixed team badminton events, respectively.

It was in CWG 2022 in Birmingham that PV Sindhu secured her first Commonwealth gold medal in the women’s singles event and backed it up with a silver medal in the mixed badminton team event.

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PV Sindhu has bagged 2 Olympic medals

PV Sindhu made the cut for the Olympic Games for the first time in the Rio Olympics in 2016. She started off the campaign by defeating Tai Tzu Ying in the Round of 16. Later, she defeated Wang Yihan and Nozumi Okuhara in the quarter-finals and semi-finals, respectively, to make it to the final.

In the final, she competed against Carolina Marin from Spain and ended up losing in three games, settling for a silver medal.

Later in 2021, she made it to the Tokyo Olympics, securing a bronze medal. Interestingly, she didn’t drop a single game before the semi-final at Tokyo Games, dominating in the group stage and knockouts.

She went down in the semi-final after giving a tough fight against Chinese Taipei’s Tai Tzu Ying. In the bronze-medal match, she defeated China’s He Bing Jiao to script history for India.

In 2022, PV Sindhu secured a bronze medal at the Badminton Asia Championships in the Philippines and went on to clinch the women's singles gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

Despite struggling for form in 2023, Sindhu propelled the country to a bronze-medal finish at the Badminton Asia Mixed Team Championships in Dubai, which marked India's first-ever medal in the tournament.

In February 2024, Sindhu returned from her injury break at the Badminton Asia Team Championships, leading the Indian women's team to the gold medal.

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