Indian badminton legend Prakash Padukone is set to travel as a mentor along with the 15-member Indian Badminton squad for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The Paris Olympics starts on 26th July with the badminton starting on 27th July and ending on 5th August.
Padukone, the first Indian to win the All England Championship, was retired in 1991 even as badminton was introduced in the Olympics at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
Recently, Double Olympic medalist shuttler PV Sindhu announced Prakash Padukone as her mentor ahead of the marquee event and shifted her base to Bengaluru from Hyderabad.
Debutant shuttler Lakshya Sen is a Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy (PPBA) product.
“There are seven players and eight support staff, including the coaches and physios,” a source told PTI.
“Pullela Gopichand, RMV Gurusaidutt, Agus Santosa, Vimal Kumar, and Mathias Boe will be the coaches traveling to Paris, while Prakash Padukone will go as a mentor. Zeinia Samar and Kiran Challagundla will be the two physiotherapists on the team.”
While Gopichand is India’s national chief coach, Gurusaidutt has been training HS Prannoy and Boe is the coach of the men’s doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty and women’s doubles combination of Ashwini Ponnappa and Tanisha Crasto.
Former India coach Vimal Kumar is currently training Lakshya, while Agus has been training Sindhu in Bengaluru.
Kiran has been a long-time physio of the Indian badminton team but Zeinia has joined Sindhu’s camp after she decided to move to Bengaluru in pursuit of an unprecedented third consecutive Olympic medal.
In the last Olympics, India’s chief coach Gopichand had decided not to travel to Tokyo due to the cap on the number of officials accompanying athletes in the light of the COVID-19 situation in 2021.