RIO DE JANEIRO -- In June, at the Australian Open Super series in Sydney, PV Sindhu lost her first round match to South Korea's Kim Hyo Min in straight games.
Min was the 40th ranked player in the world. It was an insipid performance from Sindhu and came at the back of a year that had seen her produce a string of underwhelming results. Her win-loss ratio was 23-13. She was playing okay, but for Pullela Gopichand, okay has never been acceptable. Okay means average. Okay means mediocrity.
"When she lost the first round at the Australian open we decided whatever happens we should give the Olympics our best shot," Gopichand says in his signature low-pitched, measured voice. "And she responded."
By itself, that is the kind of throwaway banal quote athletes and their coaches hurl in the direction of journalists working on tight deadlines. But when Gopichand says they decided to give the Olympics their "best shot" and that Sindhu "responded", it implies a brutal training regimen in the two months before they would board a plane to Rio.
Sindhu was asked to surrender her phone and give up eating all junk food. The coach and student woke up every morning before the first ray of sunlight, and trained. And trained. And then trained some more. And did it all over again the next day.
While Gopi was chiseling Sindhu the badminton player, he was also working on Sindhu the 21-year old, who is, well...21.
"She as a person is an extrovert, very friendly, loves people will do anything for the people whom she likes," he says. "And that is a challenge as a sportsperson because you want somebody to be really focused, put their head down but when you tell her something she will definitely do that. So she has these different personalities which you are definitely struggling with, she needs to find herself and when she does that she will be even better."
All athletes have switches that only a select few around them know how to flip on. In the fascinating documentary "Serena", a fly on the wall account of her incredible 2015 season that ended in a failed quest for the calendar Grand Slam, we get an illuminating look into the method of her coach Patrick Mouratoglou.
Mouratoglou makes little notes on each of her opponents at the US Open and ends them with a comforting personal message. One of the most successful tennis players of all time needs to hear that voice as she heads into each match of this quest and Mouratoglou knows just what to say and how much to say. Serena tells us how Mouratoglou "gets her" and that they are so "in tune" with each other.
Gopi first set eyes on Sindhu as a 10-year old back in 2005. She stood out among her peers. Her parents were volleyballers and Sindhu was genetically well served. At Gopi's academy in Hyderabad, many wide-eyed kids with eager parents would train, keen to flower under the tutelage of man who had won the All-England championships.
By 2010, having made a successful transition from top player to respected coach, Gopi was spending "considerable amount of time with her on a daily basis." He had identified the qualities of a "top level athlete" but as a teacher, Gopi was torn.
"It is tough because you have to pick from among your kids and you need to pick one for special care," he explains. "That is quite a sick job anyway.
"To believe that she could actually be the one who could put us on the international stage and take the sport up a notch higher and to give what is best to her so that neither she or I should feel that there was a talent which deserved more attention and I didn't give it to her."
It did not take long for that talent to start making rapid strides. At 18, Sindhu won bronze at the World Championships in Guangzhou. No Indian women's singles player had done so earlier. A year later in Copenhagen, she stunningly produced an encore and remains to this day the only Indian to have won two World Championships medals.
But despite those early incisions on the circuit, Sindhu's career had not quite taken off. She circled around the top-10 in the rankings and won a few titles, but not even one among them is a Super Series, the elite level tournaments in the sport.
Gopi smiles that Sindhu often wins matches he expects her to lose and then somehow goes down in matches he thinks she will win. Yet, fascinatingly, when she does suffer defeat, they engage in no post-mortem.
"What is important is that you ignore the mistakes and focus on the positives," he says. "We hardly discuss the matches that she loses. She is someone I believe has a lot of ability in her game and the strokes she plays as well. Slowly we will see more of her as she gets more confident."
While Sindhu was rising, another player in Gopi's watch was already among the best in the world. In 2014, Saina Nehwal stomped off from the academy in Hyderabad. Gopi had nurtured Saina for ten years as she rose to the top of the world rankings.
However, Saina's results had started to taper off and she felt she was not getting the "individual attention" she deserved as an elite player under Gopi's watch. Their split created a media furore unlike any other witnessed in Indian badminton before. Even today, though his stoic demeanour gives little away, the wound from that episode is raw.
I ask him if he is still hurt by that entire episode.
"It is not a profession which is all good, it is quite stressful and unfortunately in our country we don't have systems in place that can set things right and show us a way forward," he says.
"We are very immature and hopefully it is time for all of us to sit together and build a system which ensures that people know what discipline is - players, coaches and administrators know what their responsibilities are and I think its important that all of us work towards ensuring that we don't go haphazardly based on hype and media and records to take decisions but based on systems and best policies."
I prod a little more.
For a few seconds, Gopi munches over his response. He is a thoughtful man, not given to gusts of emotional outpouring. "I have players who have the potential and I believe there is a lot they can achieve and I would focus on them.
"I think Saina is a great athlete. And what she's done for us, for badminton and for the country is fantastic and I hope she continues in the same way because to have two women gunning at the highest level is something we really love and possibly there will be a few more in the next few years."
For now, though, the future - immediate or long term - is not on Gopi's mind. He is exhausted.
In Rio, two of his wards, Sindhu and Kidambi Srikanth, who gave a real fright to double Olympic champion Lin Dan before bowing out in the quarterfinals, have given him reason to sit on the plane back home a satisfied man.
Now, he just wants to get back to Hyderabad to family and friends. He offers an emphatic "Yes" when I ask if watching Sindhu on the podium felt better than winning the All-England all those years ago.
"If I do it (coaching) then I better do it well," Gopi says. "That's the way I look at it. But it is a tough job, it is stressful and discriminative in a way. It is not always a job without tension. It is a lot of work physically and mentally and it is a lot of stress as well. But these moments, to be able to be part of a group that can give happiness and pride to the entire country that kept me going and hopefully we should have many more results like these which are very important.
"This medal was very important for all of us and the nation. To be part of this great journey is something I am very grateful about. Today, we have accomplished something, and hopefully we have the fire and the energy to continue doing something for 2020."