Rabinarayan Patri doesn’t subscribe to the sentiment that a good badminton smash — or a Youth Olympics silver — needs to extract struggle or suffering out of his daughter, Tanvi. “Silver was expected, so that’s ok,” Rabi would say, adding, “Her total travel time to World Juniors in Egypt was 28 hours. For the Youth Olympics, it was 44. Complaining never helps and I can’t blame anyone, but if we don’t look at comfort of athletes from this generation, they get irritated and it doesn’t work,” Rabi says, after the 15-year-old played a humdinger of a 82-minute Youth Olympics final at Dakar, Senegal, against 17-year-old Chinese Zang Yi Xin, despite logistical nightmares.

Tanvi returned to Odisha from China, where her father was an IT professional, at age 9 during Covid and trained in her home state for a year. “She would train with temperatures reaching 50 degrees and insane humidity which built her endurance. She won’t shy away from hard work.…