Foreign coaches or Indian?

Indian badminton legend and former All England champ Pullela Gopichand – was guided by Indian coaches early on in his badminton career which brought him a lot of success at the national level. However, according to him, it was his interaction with a foreign coach - Chinese Wang Shaomin, that was the turning point is his career. The Chinese coach\'s fine tuning of his game helped Gopichand succeed at the international level. A decade later, when Gopichand took on the responsibility of mentoring India\'s most successful badminton player – Saina Nehwal – he reverted to his Chinese coach of old and even asked him to assist with the coaching.

"The coach agreed to come to India only if he would be assured that the team selection, the scheduling of camps and other technical formalities would be decide only by him. In India that was not possible and we lost out on a great coach," said Gopichand. When it was being debated by some of India\'s top sportsmen whether foreign coaches were a necessity for success at the Olympics, Gopichand – the keynote speaker of the discussion last week – didn\'t quite have a definitive answer. More than anything else, he felt the need for a system overhaul.

"We definitely need foreign coaches but we also need Indian coaches to assist them. The need of the hour, however, is a change in the system. We need to give the coaches full authority to carry out the selection of the team," said Gopichand.

Adille Sumariwalla, former Olympian and the working President of the Athletics Federation of India, felt that Athletics in India could not survive without the help of a foreign coach. The margins were very small at the professional level, and according to him, the minor tweaks in the techniques of the athletes made a world of difference. He also felt that, as far as discipline of the athletes was concerned, foreign coaches were better equipped.

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