Why India’s doubles stars deserve more respect and recognition Premium

Indian tennis thriving with players excelling in doubles, emphasizing the need for support and recognition in both singles and doubles.

Indian tennis is healthy. There are Indian players competing at all levels – from the $15,000 tournaments on the professional circuit, to the ATP tournaments to the prestigious Masters events all the way up to the Grand Slam tournaments. Week in and week out there are Indians competing in the business end of competitions across the world, fighting against the best in the business.

There are nearly a dozen Indian players in the top-200 of world doubles rankings and five of them are in the top-100. Behind Rohan Bopanna, Yuki Bhambri and Sriram Balaji are 24-year-old Rithvik Bollipalli (76) and the 26-year-old Anirudh Chandrasekar (99), who have a bright prospect of making a mark at the Slam level.

There is understandable anguish among tennis fans that India has only three players in the top-500 of singles. But doubles stars feel it is unfair to pit singles against doubles, and that they should complement each other.

“Whether singles or doubles, all of us need the tournaments at home to build the foundation in our professional career,” said Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan, World No. 110 in doubles. “Yes, the leading doubles players compete all over the world. But even for singles, we do have players like Manas Dhamne, Aryan Shah, Karan Singh and Manish Sureshkumar to gain from the exposure. We all need more tournaments at all possible levels,” Jeevan added.

When Mahesh Bhupathi won the French Open mixed doubles title with Rika Hiraki of Japan in 1997, the first Grand Slam title for India, it was hailed as the big breakthrough. Leander Paes and Bhupathi, and later Sania Mirza and Rohan Bopanna, won dozens of doubles titles between them on the biggest stages at Wimbledon, Melbourne, Paris and New York, making everyone proud.

Bopanna and Sania were a set away from bagging an Olympic medal in Rio in 2016. It was Bopanna and Rutuja Bhosale who won the mixed doubles gold in the last Asian Games in Hangzhou.

“There is no doubt that we need to strengthen our singles pipeline, but the repeated framing of doubles success as lesser or secondary is not only misleading, it is deeply disrespectful to the athletes who have carried India’s name on the global tennis stage,” said Bopanna, who won the admiration of the tennis fraternity across the globe last year by becoming the doubles World No. 1 at 44.