At Home For Sindhu, Biryani And Mysore Pak Cooked By Mom

Hyderabad: At the champion's home in Hyderabad today, there is biryani and Mysore pak. Special treats for 21-year-old PV Sindhu who returned today with an Olympic Silver around her neck.

Sindhu landed at the Hyderabad airport on Monday morning and will get home at Kokapet only much later in the day after a victory rally in a specially commissioned open double-decker bus and celebrations at the Gachibowli Stadium in the city.

Her mother P Vijaya said she has cooked Sindhu's favourite food today - she loves biryani and Mysore pak, a sweet, but has not eaten these in months as she trained for the Rio Olympics. She gets the treat only today and is likely to be back by tomorrow to the strict regimen that she follows under the supervision of her coach Pullela Gopichand training for her next tournament.

The ice-cream that Sindhu was allowed after her stupendous performance at Rio, where she stretched world no 1 Carolina Marin to a one hour 23 minute final, made headlines, mainly because she gets to eat one so rarely.  

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"Sindhu did not have her phone during the last three months. The first thing is I will return is her phone. The second thing, after coming here for the last 12-13 days, I had deprived her from having sweet curd which she likes most. I also stopped her from eating ice-cream. Now she can eat whatever she wants," an elated Gopichand had said last week after Sindhu became the first Indian woman to win a Silver at the Olympics.

Pullela Gopichand is known to be a strict disciplinarian and it seems to have worked. He has trained two Olympic medallists in Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu and Srikant Kidambi reached the men's badminton quarter finals this year.  

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Sindhu, a two-time World Championship bronze medallist, beat three players who outrank her en route to the final. She beat world No 8 Tzu Ying Tai of Chinese Taipei in the prequarters, world No 2 Wang Yihan of China in the last eight and in the semi-final, she breezed past world No 6 Nozomi Okuhara of Japan to assure India its first silver in badminton.