When PV Sindhu met Datta Sai Venkata: How the couple is all set to open an academy

Marriages are made in heaven, the cliche goes. In PV Sindhu and Datta Sai Venkata’s case, it happened a few thousand miles below, in an airplane. “We were family friends, not super close but well acquainted,” says Datta, “Then in December 2022 or January 2023, we started talking. We actually ‘re-met’, on a flight. She was travelling for an event and I, on work.” They got talking and decided to take the next step. “It took a year, it wasn’t a one-month decision,” adds Datta.

“He is very passionate about every sport he follows. Since he married a badminton player, he’s deeply into badminton now, which is good,” says Sindhu, as she breaks into a smile. “He provides a lot of input from his perspective. He doesn’t hold back and wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s good to have married someone outside the sport who also knows a lot about it. He doesn’t get bored. I’m really lucky that way.”

It is not easy for a female athlete in India to get married while still being an active professional, especially if she’s marrying someone outside the sport. There are, of course, examples of athletes marrying each other and that comes with a level of understanding that their careers will still be a priority.

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Post-Paris Olympics, Sindhu took a break from the sport to assess her future. Datta says she felt the need for stability in her personal life to continue performing well on the professional front. “Having stability around her helps take her mind off difficult decisions. She needs to focus on her performance. In the recent past, I have started taking all strategic calls for team PVS while all professional calls are taken by the coach,” says Datta.

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Datta, 30, might be from ‘outside’ badminton but he is a sports nerd. His love for sports started with following Formula 1 with his father. His uncle then introduced him to cricket; he remembers watching the 2003 World Cup. “I am a purist, so I loved Dravid but you can’t not be a Sachin fan.” Currently, he follows at least eight different sports. “I am a big Manchester United fan, sadly things are not good at the moment,” he chuckles. At a professional level, Datta also had the chance to dabble in the private sports industry around 2017-18 as a part of JSW Sports. He has been an executive director at Posidex (a data management tech enterprise) in Hyderabad since December 2019, and is all about Team Sindhu.

PV Sindhu with her many laurels (Photo courtesy: Datta Sai Venkata) PV Sindhu with her many laurels (Photo courtesy: Datta Sai Venkata)

It took him a while to warm up to badminton. “My dad played a lot at a club in Mysore. I remember the biggest argument between my parents was that my dad loved his badminton more than my mom. For me, it took a while because you need a hero to fall in love with the sport. Indian badminton didn’t have that initially,” says Datta.

He then discusses Saina Nehwal being the ‘quintessential trailblazer’ and that ‘she doesn’t always get the respect she deserves’. As far as Sindhu is concerned, he vividly recalls the Rio 2016 final against Spain’s Carolina Marin. He chuckles at how both the shortest and longest finals of her career came from playing against her good friend Nozomi Okuhara of Japan. He remembers meeting Sindhu after Rio 2016: “She told me, ‘Yeah, I have won silvers and bronzes, but I need to win a goddamn gold too’. Then, in 2019 World Championships, she changed that, and how.”

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In the Indian Olympic sports landscape, Sindhu has always been cut from a different cloth. She tasted success at the highest level of her sport very young. She brought her A-game to the big events. She was a natural athlete who was destined to take up sport as her career and rarely ever complained publicly about the road to the top. While playing a sport where in-competition earnings are minimal, she (and her team over the years) carefully constructed her brand off the courts, which has seen her consistently feature among the top-earning female athletes globally. She won a World Championship and an Olympic medal on her debut and didn’t stop there. In a country where such high-level success is both rare and late, Sindhu made it frequent and early.

As she starts writing another chapter in her career — closer to the prologue than the foreword — Sindhu is aiming differently. The desire to win is there, of course, but the focus now is more on picking and choosing the right tournaments, the big ones, and mainly keeping her body healthy. After a few changes in the last couple of years, 2025 began with another new coach in her corner — Indonesia’s Irwansyah — who she hopes can help unlock new facets of her game. And a little bit behind the coaching chair, Datta is another addition to her team, taking up front-row seats for her matches — he was at the Syed Modi International tournament in Lucknow last year when Sindhu won, on the down-low before the wedding announcement was made.

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With Datta’s inputs, by the end of next year, Sindhu hopes to have her academy up and running in Visakhapatnam; work is already under way. “Badminton has taught me a lot and I want to give back,” says Sindhu, “When I thought about constructing an academy, I wanted something world-class with good infrastructure. I have a lot of ideas about coaching, mindset and different strategies. It’s important to have more Sindhus out there, so I will do my bit for that.”

PV Sindhu on the construction site of her academy. (Photo courtesy: Datta Sai Venkata) PV Sindhu on the construction site of her academy. (Photo courtesy: Datta Sai Venkata)

“The academy is her dream,” Datta chimes in, “She told me very clearly on day one. ‘I want to produce talent, not make money on this’. So I want to work with partners, subsidise and provide things for free to set up a high-performance academy where kids come to become players. We are not trying to make it a financial model. We’re blessed to have partners enabling this, so it can be free for kids.”

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The centrepiece of the plan, Datta says, is the Sindhu Mentorship Programme, designed for the top eight girls in the country, covering all costs, including stay, food, nutrition and travel. Sindhu and Datta will handle raising the money for about 15 tournaments a year. “We don’t want to draw a single rupee from the academy, we want kids to benefit. We also aim to bring about three foreign coaches. One doubles coach, one singles coach and some sort of a head coach.”

Datta talks about a few talented youngsters he has had the chance to observe from close quarters, lamenting that sometimes India’s juniors get exposed for lacking in some fundamental aspects of the sport. One kid is so good with the basics, but just the backhand is lacking. Another kid has all the shots in the book but lacks the temperament sometimes to win longer rallies. “When you can win a point after 40 shots, why rush into it at the 7th or 8th? Anyway, I will stop here, else I will continue talking for a long time. Over to Sindhu.”

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It helped Sindhu that success came early. At 18, on her World Championships debut, she navigated a tough draw beating two top Chinese players on the way to a bronze medal. That run in Guangzhou gave her the belief that she could do more. “It was a huge reward, especially at that point in my career. It was a starting point where I realised I could achieve more. That’s where it all began, it set the stage for my future success,” says Sindhu.

That is where the void of the next generation is being felt. Sindhu has won five World Championship medals, including the famous gold at Basel 2019, but after her and Saina Nehwal, no other women’s singles player has managed to impress at the major tournament. At 29, Sindhu continues to be the poster athlete for India in a discipline where success usually comes early and weary bodies struggle.

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“Everyone progresses differently, so I will not comment on the age factor,” Sindhu says, when asked if it is worrying for Indian women’s singles that teenagers haven’t hit the level she managed. “I don’t say you have to win at a young age, but if you do, it’s important to maintain it. It shouldn’t be a one-off. They need to work hard and have the right guidance. It’s important to improve, this is the age for it, keep growing, work hard. There’s a bit of a gap, for sure, but I see potential. They need continuous guidance,” she says.

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Her recent visit to the National Centre of Excellence in Guwahati has given Sindhu hope and a framework for her academy. Attending a camp in February, Sindhu liked what she saw in terms of the facilities available to junior athletes and the coaching setup — things she hopes to get right when her academy is up and running. “There are good coaches, and of course, Park (Tae-Sang, who worked with Sindhu leading up to Tokyo) is an excellent coach. The infrastructure, the gym, everything is really good. It’s just a matter of the players training hard, being disciplined, and giving their best.”

At different junctures in her career, Sindhu has had the right guidance behind her. Pullela Gopichand helped unlock her potential, South Korea’s Kim Ji Hyun came on to guide her to the elusive World Championships gold, and coach Park then took her to where no Indian female athlete had gone before — winning back-to-back Olympic medals.

Since Park, there has been some churn in her backroom staff in recent years but Sindhu has a reputation of being an easy athlete to coach. “You’d have to ask the coaches about that (smiles). But for me, working with every coach is a different lifestyle,” she says, “I’ve learned something from each of them. It’s important to learn and unlearn, to have different mindsets, strategies, and plans, and keep evolving your gameplay.”

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Does Sindhu see herself in the coaching chair sometime in the future? “It’s too soon to decide that,” she laughs.

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India had a female shuttler on the podium at the Olympics for three straight editions from London 2012 to Tokyo 2020. That run ended in Paris. It hurt Sindhu. It is worrying that India is still looking at Sindhu to lead the charge at LA 2028, despite a few promising teenagers coming up. But it is about keeping that fire burning bright just for herself. “Paris was hard. It was my third Olympics and I wanted to win gold. It took time to recover, but I had to get back to the sport and focus on what’s next,” she says.

While love off-court has blossomed, has she found the love for her sport again? “Yes, definitely. I’m very excited and looking forward to the next steps and tournaments. Of course, the fire is still burning to get out there and get some wins. I have a new team. It might take time, but it’s going to come. I can tell you the desire… it’s right up there.”

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