P. V. Sindhu Has Two Olympic Medals, Silver at Rio 2016 and Bronze at Tokyo 2020, and Five World Championships Medals Including the 2019 Gold in Basel

P. V. Sindhu has won two Olympic medals, a silver at Rio 2016 and a bronze at Tokyo 2020, and five medals at the world championships run by the Badminton World Federation (BWF), the last of them the 2019 gold. On 1 August 2021 the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Indian government’s press office, said that her Tokyo bronze made her the first Indian woman to win two Olympic medals.

Both PIB and Olympedia, the Olympic statistics database, give her birth as 5 July 1995 in Hyderabad. Her most recent results are a Japan Open Super 750 title on 19 July 2026 and a French Open final on 25 October 2026.

The Rio final of 19 August 2016

Carolina Marin of Spain won the women’s singles final at Rio 2016 on 19 August 2016 by 19-21 21-12 21-15 (Marin’s score first, as BWF gives it), and Sindhu took silver. According to BWF’s match report the final lasted 80 minutes, and Marin became the first non-Asian women’s singles Olympic champion.

Rio was Sindhu’s first Olympics, and BWF’s account has her going for the title. Marin led the first game 19-16, and Sindhu scored the last five points to take it 21-19. Marin took the next two games, opening the third with a 5-1 lead, BWF says.

Japan’s Nozomi Okuhara had lost to Sindhu in the semi-final, BWF notes in its 2017 world final report. After the final Sindhu, then 21, said she was “on cloud nine” and spoke of being the first Indian to win a silver medal in badminton.

Tokyo 2020, played in 2021

Tokyo 2020 took place in 2021, and Sindhu beat He Bing Jiao of China 21-13 21-15 in the bronze medal match on 1 August 2021, BWF and PIB both report. Her semi-final had gone to Tai Tzu Ying of Chinese Taipei, who then lost the gold medal match to China’s Chen Yu Fei in three games, so the bronze match was Sindhu’s.

That evening’s PIB release called Sindhu the first Indian woman to win two Olympic medals and named wrestler Sushil Kumar as the only other Indian with two. A message from the President, reproduced there, described her as the first Indian woman to win medals at two Olympic Games. Since then Manu Bhaker has won two medals at a single Games, as covered in tuput’s piece on Bhaker and Paris 2024.

Four days after Sindhu’s bronze the men’s hockey team won theirs, as the account of India’s two Olympic hockey bronzes records, and the same Games gave India Neeraj Chopra’s javelin gold.

Olympedia lists her and table tennis player Sharath Kamal as India’s flagbearers at the Paris 2024 opening ceremony, and records her singles finish there as joint ninth.

Five World Championships medals and the Basel gold

BWF’s podium pages and match reports show Sindhu on the women’s singles podium five times. The medals are bronze in 2013 and 2014, silver in 2017 and 2018, and gold in 2019.

Okuhara won the 2017 final in Glasgow 21-19 20-22 22-20. The match lasted 110 minutes, the second-longest women’s singles match on record, BWF says. Sindhu took the second game 22-20 after a 73-shot rally and led 19-17 in the third. A year later, in Nanjing, she lost the final to Marin, BWF’s Basel report recalls.

Basel, on 25 August 2019, brought another meeting with Okuhara. Sindhu won 21-7 21-7 in 38 minutes in front of about 9,000 spectators at St. Jakobshalle, BWF reports, and on the way she beat Beiwen Zhang, Tai Tzu Ying and Chen Yu Fei. BWF called her the first person from her country to win a world championship. Aged 24, she won on her mother’s birthday.

“This is my answer to the people who have asked me questions over and over,” Sindhu said afterwards. Asked about the podium, she said she “had goosebumps” when she heard herself called world champion and saw the Indian flag go up, and that “Badminton is my passion and I feel that I can win more titles.”

Commonwealth Games, Asian Games and the 2018 World Tour Finals

Her Commonwealth Games medals start with a singles bronze at Glasgow 2014, which Olympedia lists. Gold Coast 2018 brought mixed team gold, PIB’s profile and Olympedia agree, and singles silver after losing an all-India final to Saina Nehwal 21-18 23-21 on 15 April 2018, BWF reports. Birmingham 2022 brought singles gold on 8 August 2022, the final day of the Games, as PIB’s medal release shows. The Games are due in India in 2030, as tuput’s report on Ahmedabad’s selection explains.

Olympedia lists, at the Asian Games, a team bronze at Incheon 2014 and singles silver at Jakarta 2018. Tai Tzu Ying beat her 21-13 21-16 in the Jakarta final on 28 August 2018, BWF’s report says.

On 16 December 2018 she beat Okuhara 21-19 21-19 in the final of the HSBC BWF World Tour Finals, which BWF calls the first Indian win at the season finale. No title had come that year, and BWF’s report lists her earlier final defeats: Rio 2016, the 2017 World Championships, the 2017 Dubai World Superseries Finals, and the 2018 World Championships and Asian Games.

From Mehboob Ali’s courts to the Gopichand academy

PIB’s 2021 profile says Sindhu’s parents were both national-level volleyball players, and her father is an Arjuna Award recipient. Badminton began for her at 8 under coach Mehboob Ali, learning the basics at the courts of the Indian Railway Institute of Signal Engineering and Telecommunications in Secunderabad, and travelled 56 km a day to get there. Next came the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy, where she won several titles in the under-10 category.

The profile lists Gopichand and others at his academy as her development coaches and names Park Tae Sang, an elite coach of hers since 2018, as her personal coach. Her training base, it says, is the academy and the Balayogi Sports Complex at Gachibowli, with Gopichand as national coach. Olympedia gives the Gopichand Badminton Academy as her affiliation.

After the Gold Coast singles final, Gopichand, then India’s head coach, said every performance in the badminton team had been good, naming “Saina and Sindhu in the Women’s Singles final”, BWF reports.

The sports ministry’s profile, dated 1 August 2021, lists Rs 3,97,79,180 (about Rs 3.98 crore) in support through its TOPS and ACTC schemes, and financial assistance for 52 international competitions in the Olympic cycle.

The honours

The same profile lists the Arjuna Award (2013), the Padma Shri (2015), the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna (2016) and the Padma Bhushan (2020). PIB’s list of Padma Awards 2015, announced on 25 January 2015, names her under sports, Telangana. President Pranab Mukherjee conferred the Khel Ratna at Rashtrapati Bhawan on 29 August 2016, together with gymnast Dipa Karmakar, shooter Jitu Rai and wrestler Sakshi Malik.

Results in 2026, to 27 October

Sindhu won the Daihatsu Japan Open Super 750 on 19 July 2026, beating home favourite Akane Yamaguchi 21-17 21-17. BWF says her last major title before it came at the 2019 Worlds and her last Super 500 title at the Singapore Open in May 2022. The Syed Modi International, a Super 300 event, had been her last title, 19 months earlier, she said, and this one was “very important for me”.

In August 2026, at the World Championships in New Delhi, she reached the round of 16 and lost 21-11 15-21 21-17 to the third seed, Wang Zhi Yi of China. BWF’s review of memorable matches says Sindhu had Wang in trouble in the third game, and that the match lasted 88 minutes.

At the French Open in Paris she reached the final, won the first game and then lost the match on 25 October 2026 to world No. 1 An Se Young, 16-21 21-11 21-12. BWF says it was An’s fourth French Open women’s singles title.

The Hylo Open in Saarbrucken began on 27 October 2026 with Sindhu as second seed, opening against the UAE’s Prakriti Bharath.