Badminton came late to the Olympics, at Barcelona in 1992. But the Games can change the institutional memory of a sport very fast, and the highest prize for a badminton player today is arguably the Olympic gold. Saina Nehwal knows it when she leaves the court after her quarter-final on Wednesday morning.

“I want to play her now,” she says minutes after losing a curious last set to Maria Kristin Yulianti of Indonesia.

We wish. So she explains herself instead: “I don’t know what happened. Maybe I made a lot of mistakes. I don’t know.” Then: “I’ll be much more prepared next time. I’ll be much more experienced.”

At 18, she has time to acclimatise to her ambition. It is, also, not an airy promise. Today, it is not that she came so close to making it to the last four — in a three-gamer, she had a 28-26, 14-21, 11-3 lead, till Yulianti took away the last game 20-15. (There is a bronze medal playoff.) It is, as her coach Pullela Gopichand says, her desire to win so badly, her impatience with sitting back and looking for cheap points. In fact, if anything, she works too hard to create the point.

Out of his earshot, Nehwal illustrates the assessment. Ask her what is the one thing she’d change from the match today, and the prospect of reliving the match relaxes her features for the first time: “I wouldn’t have given up the lead. I would have finished the match.”

... contd.