A tale of gold medals

P V Sindhu won a gold medal at BWF World Badminton championship held recently at Basel, Switzerland. It made editorial news in at least 4 major national dailies and many of them carried her interview. Amul too had an ad specially made to celebrate her victory.

Manasi Joshi too won a gold medal at Para BWF World Badminton championship SL3 held a bit earlier at Basel, Switzerland. Her triumph was also reported, albeit in much lesser space in major national dailies but no editorials for her!

Incidentally, Manasi, world ranking 2 defeated the top ranked Parul Parmar in the finals. It is one of the rare events where No. 1 and no. 2 world rankers are from India! However, most of the media ignored Parul’s credentials while reporting Manasi’s win.

Both Manasi & Sindhu were coached by P Gopichand in his academy at Hyderabad.

Parul is a coach at SAI and is based at Gandhinagar. And, can you guess Parul’s age? She is 46 years old now. She earlier won the gold medal at Para BWF world championship twice in 2015 and 2017 at the age of 42 and 44 years respectively!

Pramod Bhagat from Bhubaneshwar won not one but two Gold medals at the same Para BWF World Badminton championship SL3 at Basel, Switzerland. He is ranked world no. 1. He won singles as well as doubles gold medal partnering Manoj Sarkar. He had earlier won a bronze medal in the world championships in 2015 & 2017 respectively. Pramod is nominated for Arjuna award in 2019.

Pramod & Manoj defeated another Indian pair – Nitesh & Tarun in the finals! None of the national media covered these fantastic achievements!

While P Gopichand rightly deserves to be congratulated on his players performance, Gaurav Khanna who coaches Pramod and other para players seem to have been mostly ignored by the media!

So, is media biased?