Pi Hongyan, World No.4: Making of a champion

Pi Hongyan, the world’s fourth-best badminton player, cried on the flight to India. She was watching a movie and the visuals of children born in slums were too disturbing. This is a top-10 player who deals with pressure better than most people on the planet. “But what I liked was the hope that the boy had,” she said of the lead character.

Hope has always been her most precious commodity. Back in her teens (she’s now 30), when she was at the national centre in Beijing (for juniors), training eight hours a day, six days a week, for two years straight, the only thing that kept her going was hope — that she would someday break into the national squad.

“The training was hard,” she says, relaxing at a hotel in Hyderabad.
The India Open begins on Tuesday and she is the top seed. “We had one free hour a day. I was staying away from home, could not meet my parents often. Initially it was difficult but then I got used to it.”
Hongyan is often referred to as the ‘French player of Chinese origin’.
She’s among the early generation of promising Chinese players — Germany’s Xu Huaiwen is another — who left their homeland to play for other countries.

She was part of the junior national programme for two years. Among her classmates were some who went on to become world and Olympic champions. But Hongyan was told she wouldn’t be good enough to crack the senior team.

That’s when she decided to move. She played for a club in Denmark for two years before shifting to France in 2002, and the move paid off with her breaking into the top 10.

She’s now one of the most consistent players on the circuit. “In China, if a coach tells you to do something, you do it, no questions. In France, a coach asks you to do something and then enquires about how you feel. But you can’t produce champions that way. I’d prefer a middle path, taking the best of both systems, with hard training and concern for the well-being of players.”

With the Chinese sweeping all five events at the 2009 All England meet, the world is awe-struck at the system they have in place. Most critics, however, refer to the downside of their system — the high incidence of injuries and mental trauma that aren’t known to the outside world, and which would make that system unacceptable in democratic societies. “I know,” she says. “My best friend had to drop out because of an injury. And she was better than me.”