Saina Nehwal walks in wearing a pastel green salwar suit, her hair neatly tied back. Almost instinctively, she apologises for making us wait, even though she hasn’t. Her home carries the modest hum of a regular Indian household. Her father, Harvir Singh Nehwal, sits before the television, glancing up occasionally. He is preparing a meal for Chopsy, the family dog, who circles expectantly. Saina’s mother, Usha Rani, moves between the kitchen and the dining area, overseeing breakfast.
Nothing about the setting screams ‘world champion’, except the medals that can be seen across the house. Many of them are placed on a large table, not yet organised and displayed.
When asked what she does not like about her daughter, Usha responds without missing a beat: “She doesn't know how to cook for the life of her.” Saina laughs. “What is the need, mama?” she shoots back, mock-indignant.
Harvir, a retired scientist with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, offers his observation. “She doesn't rest,” he says. “She's a go-getter. It is tough to simply be when one is not used to it.”
Saina says that while people remember her achievements, they do not know what it took. Her own moment of realisation—that it was time to pause—came at Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala's office at Mumbai's Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital. It was during her first visit to the doctor in 2016. After her shock defeat to Ukraine’s Marija Ulitina at Rio 2016, she boarded the first available flight out. The memory haunts her to this day.
We are seated on a patio outside her swanky villa in one of Hyderabad's upmarket addresses. Chopsy, a 14-year-old male Shih Tzu, keeps a close watch on us. For Saina, he has made the pain of being forced to sit at home and watch her contemporaries excel more bearable. A degenerated knee stops her from playing even for leisure.
After the loss to Ulitina, she told her father that she wanted to go home immediately. He tried to convince her to stay a little longer. But, she was in too much pain.
Going into the Olympics, Saina was confident of medalling and hoped to improve on her bronze from London 2012. Ulitina, who progressed from the group stage thanks to her win against Saina, lost the next match—the round of 16—to Thai player Porntip Buranaprasertsuk, against whom Saina has won 10 of 12 matches. Against eventual gold medallist, Spaniard Carolina Marin, Saina has a 6-7 win-loss record.
The trouble began barely a week before the departure for Rio. There had been no fall, no awkward landing, no visible trauma; just a swelling in her knee that came out of nowhere. She consulted a doctor, who diagnosed inflammation and advised rest. She stopped training for three to four days. “But, as time passed, I couldn't lunge, couldn't climb stairs, couldn't even bend my knee while sleeping,” she says. With the Olympic flight just days away, the decision was made to travel.
Once in Rio, during practice, lunges felt unstable. Jumping backward hurt. She was limping and struggling to climb on to the team bus. Yet, she tried to push through—with cortisone injections and heavy taping before matches. But, nothing worked. The pain was constant.
She won the first match, but moments before the decisive match against Ulitina, she felt a throbbing pain. “It was as if this menacing monster was pulling me back from playing my game,” she says. Even before she could settle into the match, she could see it was all going to slip away. Harvir was in the stands, watching as she struggled through phases he knew she would normally dominate. Officials from the association, long-time supporters and sponsors who had backed her for years were all there. They had seen her fight through gruelling matches; something was clearly wrong. Saina’s body was refusing to respond to her will.
The defeat was so clouded by pain that she barely remembers the opponent. What she can recall clearly is an overwhelming feeling that something with her knee had gone horribly wrong. With the benefit of hindsight, she agrees going to Rio was a mistake. “Playing with injections was wrong,” she says. “But as an athlete, you fight. You do not want to quit. The early loss was heartbreaking.”
When you play at the highest level, Saina says, there are phases when your body and mind are constantly being tested. “When you aim to be a world champion or Olympic medallist, the pressure never really stops,” she says. “For me, the realisation came not as one dramatic moment, but as an accumulation of pain, injuries and fatigue.”
She knew how to deal with loss; she had done it many times before.
Badminton fans in India will not soon forget her performance at Beijing 2008. An unseeded Saina, 18 then, was sensational, reaching the quarterfinals after beating Asian Games champion and fourth seed, Hong Kong’s Wang Chen, in a three-game thriller. But, she lost the chance to reach the semifinals when she lost a three-gamer to Indonesia’s world No. 16 Maria Kristin Yulianti after leading 11-3 in the decider.
“That night, I cried for hours,” she says. “But, Gopi sir (Pullela Gopichand) told me: 'Show up tomorrow.' I did. That changed everything.” The comeback was spectacular. She soon rose to world No. 2 and, in 2015, attained No. 1 ranking, the second Indian (after Prakash Padukone) and the first Indian woman to do so.
But, the loss in Rio was different—she feared that she may not be able to bounce back.
After landing in Mumbai, Saina and Harvir went straight to the hospital. It was the first time she had ever heard a doctor say: “There is nothing left.”
There was an extra bone growth—an osteophyte—in her knee that had been broken. “It happens when you push your body for years,” she says. “I began playing seriously at nine. For nearly a decade, I had no professional physiotherapist or trainer. My body paid the price.” Once Gopichand became involved, he kept telling her “not to kill herself in training”. He said she does not have to train for 10-11 hours, but instead 6-7 hours of quality training. He also advised her to eat well and consume enough protein. But, the lack of access to sports science expertise in her formative years seems to have taken a heavy toll.
By the time Harvir’s job brought the family from Haryana’s Hisar to Hyderabad, sport had already claimed an eight-year-old Saina. She used to put her name down for races at school without informing her parents. She won, collected her trophies and walked home as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When Usha first noticed, Saina explained herself matter-of-factly—“I just gave my name and took part.” It was not a clear ambition yet, just an irrepressible urge to compete.
She had tried different sports, including cricket, but never badminton. Saina had also excelled in karate. The training was demanding, but even then, she had embraced the grind. So, Saina knew only that she would take up a sport in her new city, but did not know which one.
Harvir suggested badminton, prompted by Gopichand’s success around the time and the growing badminton ecosystem in Hyderabad. The first time she was asked to play a shot, she hit a smash, and Harvir was told that his daughter would go places.
Living nearly 25km from the Lal Bahadur Shastri Stadium, Saina and Harvir would leave home at 4am, taking two buses to make it in time for the 6am session. Training would stretch for hours, sometimes till 9am, sometimes 11am, because Saina refused to stop. Her father, despite having to reach his office at 9am, would sit quietly in the stands, never complaining. Later this schedule extended to both day and evening, consuming most of her waking hours.
And so she kept playing, game after game, supported by “glasses of milk with ghee, almond oil twice a day, loads of dry fruits, dense laddoos and bone marrow soup,” says Usha. But, recovery was limited to “daily oil massages”.
“I was often teased for my strength and agility by other players; for drinking so much milk,” she says. “But nobody ever suggested that I should look out for wear and tear of my body.”
Pardiwala, a sports medicine expert, recalls the day Saina came to him with a “broken knee and chronic wear and tear”. He says that an elite sportsperson’s body has to deal with the workload of both competition and training. “With schedules becoming more hectic, there is often no off-season and no respite for the body,” he says.
Osteophyte, commonly known as a bone spur, is an extra bony growth that forms along the edges of a joint. It usually develops over time when a joint is subjected to repeated stress, friction or degeneration. In high-impact sports with constant load on the knees, the body sometimes responds by laying down extra bone in an attempt to stabilise the joint. The problem arises when that extra growth becomes prominent or unstable.
If an osteophyte breaks or fragments, as happened in Saina's case, it can cause acute pain, swelling and mechanical blockage inside the joint. The loose fragment can irritate surrounding tissues, restrict movement and trigger inflammation, making basic actions like bending the knee or lunging intensely painful.
Dr Sarang Patki, consultant, orthopaedics, Fortis Hiranandani Hospital, Navi Mumbai, says that for elite athletes, the body does not age like it does for the average person. “It accumulates load,” he says. “In fast-paced sports like badminton, you have constant start-stop movements and pivoting,” he says. “The anterior cruciate ligament provides rotational stability to the knee. When that ligament is damaged, even if surgically reconstructed, you rarely get back 100 per cent.”
Even a small deficit matters at the elite level. A reconstructed ligament may function at 80-90 per cent capacity. For a recreational player, that may be sufficient. But, for a world-class athlete whose game depends on explosive direction changes, that gap can translate into instability and friction in the joint. Over time, that friction wears down cartilage—the smooth coating that prevents bones from rubbing directly against each other. “With reduced ligament control, the bones experience increased contact stress,” says Patki. “That is what eventually leads to arthritis, like in Saina's case.”
Patki as well as renowned coaches, including Gopichand, observe that many long-lasting elite athletes prioritise three fundamentals: diet, structured training and sleep. They also point to style of play as an overlooked factor, explaining how athletes who chase every ball and push through every point, may unknowingly increase cumulative joint stress over years. “Knee replacement is not an option for athletes,” says Patki. “It is a last-resort procedure for severely worn-out joints and cannot restore elite performance.”
So how exactly does repeated high-impact injuries compound over time in an elite badminton player, and what makes managing them particularly challenging? As we grow older, the ability of our bones, joints, muscles and tendons to endure these excessively high workloads for prolonged periods of time becomes challenging, say experts. An inability to cope with these loads often results in overuse injuries and a decrease in training capabilities.
Much like Rafael Nadal's knees or Tiger Woods' spine, Saina's injury was the cost of years of repetition at the highest level. Given that racket sports rely heavily on explosive lower-body movement, what seemed like a minor swelling before Rio was, in fact, the accumulation of nearly a decade of uncompromising load.
In an academic paper titled 'Badminton Injuries in Elite Athletes: A Review of Epidemiology and Biomechanics', published in the Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, Pardiwala writes that badminton, considered the fastest of the racquet sports, needs aerobic stamina, agility, strength, speed and precision, besides motor coordination. “The game is physically challenging and poses a high risk of overuse injuries to both the appendicular and axial musculoskeletal systems,” he writes. “It also necessitates short bursts of movement with sharp changes in direction, which places players at risk of non-contact traumatic injuries to joints and muscle-tendon units.” He says that decreasing time away from training and competition is critical in an elite badminton player's sporting career.
A paper titled ‘Epidemiology of Badminton Injuries’, published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine, based on a study involving 375 randomly chosen elite and recreational badminton players, of whom 81 per cent could be followed, revealed the pathophysiology to be overuse in 74 per cent of injured players, strains in 12 per cent, sprains in 11 per cent and fractures in 1.5 per cent. It noted that the majority of injuries occurred in the lower extremity, most notably in the knee and ankle.
The report also showed that the musculature of the lower extremities is especially important. In fact, the need for muscular endurance combined with appropriate maximal and explosive muscle strength in elite badminton players is gaining importance.
Dr Vaibhav Daga, head, sports science and rehabilitation at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, says early musculoskeletal screenings and prehab exercises help identify imbalances and strengthen weak areas, reducing the risk of overuse injuries and promoting long-term recovery. “Such programmes not only prepare the body to withstand future stress but also accelerate recovery when injuries do occur, ensuring athletes like Saina can perform at elite levels for as long as possible,” he says. “Without these preventive measures, the wear and tear from years of high-intensity training can eventually catch up, limiting an athlete’s ability to return to peak performance.”
How did the injury change Saina’s perspective? “Money, medals, rankings,” she says, “don’t give lasting happiness. What matters is doing what you love and feeling healthy while doing it. Sweating every day, eating well, staying active, that’s real wealth. When your body breaks down, you realise everything else is secondary.”
“I didn’t quit because I lost,” she adds. “I stepped back because my body couldn’t hide the truth any more.”