Tanvi Patri – Indian badminton’s latest rising star Premium

Tanvi Patri's rapid rise in Indian badminton showcases her potential to become a future international star.

At the entrance of the sprawling Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence in Bengaluru, a giant billboard showcasing the best achievements of the Centre’s wards welcomes visitors. Some of India’s most noted athletes, including Lakshya Sen, have had their photos splashed across, lending an additional circle of light to their already luminous halo.

The latest to be given this prize of place is Tanvi Patri, the 13-year-old from Odisha who won the Asian U-15 girls’ singles title at Chengdu, China in August. A month later, at the sub-junior Nationals in Chennai, the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy (PPBA) trainee clinched the U-15 and U-17 singles titles. Such was her dominance that in China she did not lose a single game across five matches. In Chennai, she dropped one across 12.

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To be fair, Tanvi is not the first Indian girl to triumph in Asia in recent times; Samiya Imad Farooqui and Tasnim Mir have both notched up victories, in 2017 and 2019 respectively.

But what’s astonishing about Tanvi’s success is her quality to not fall off the emotional cliff after winning one big tournament. It is this repeatability, coupled with the desire to constantly improve, that is perhaps telling her coaches and parents that she is really made for the big stage.

Tanvi has had a beginning in badminton unlike many others’. She picked up the game as a six-year-old in China, where her father Rabinarayan Patri was working for an IT firm near Shanghai. A recreational player in his college days, Rabinarayan started playing the racquet sport in China and Tanvi just followed him. With English-medium schools hard to find, Tanvi played sport full-time while being home-schooled by her mother, Sailabala Panda, also an IT professional.

“Till around eight-and-half years, she worked very hard,” Rabinarayan tells The Hindu. “We practised almost daily. Not only badminton, but even swimming and skating. The infrastructure there was outstanding and they were very welcoming. She won practically every badminton tournament she played, all the way up to the U-12 category.