When Tan Kim Her Is Named: Drumbeats from Indian Badminton's Closed Room Before Asian Games 2026

The call came at 11:47 PM Kuala Lumpur time. On the other end was a Malaysian badminton coach packing his suitcase — over a decade in Southeast Asia had softened his northern Vietnamese accent with Malaysian cadences, but the way he spoke about "the kids" remained intact. I heard the zipper close, the soft knock of rackets against one another as he slid them into his bag. He told me he was flying to Hyderabad for a new project. At first I thought this was simply a personal story.

Then I remembered. Back in June, when the Badminton Association of India (BAI) announced its 20-player squad for the Asian Games 2026 in Aichi-Nagoya, I had read it like any other news item. PV Sindhu, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, Lakshya Sen, HS Prannoy, Kidambi Srikanth, Arjun Ramachandran, Ayush Shetty, Gayatri Gopichand... A long list, covering all five disciplines, sounding very "comprehensive." I underlined a few familiar names and turned the page. Only after that midnight call did I hear the rest of the story — the part sitting between two figures that rarely appear side by side in a press release: 20 athletes, and three coaches from three different countries.

When the closed door of a badminton federation's meeting room shuts, the real match begins. And in India, that door had just closed behind a Malaysian.

A gold medal to defend, and a shadow too large

Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. The Asian Games 2026 run from September 19 to October 4, according to the schedule published by the organisers. Within the badminton world, we often joke that this is "a continental championship harder than the world championship" — because Asia gathers nearly every powerhouse: China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Chinese Taipei. There are no shortcuts here.

For India, this is a Games of defending past achievements. In Hangzhou 2026, they claimed one gold, one silver and one bronze — bringing India's total Asian Games badminton medals to 13. That gold belonged to the doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, who defeated their opponents in the men's doubles final to deliver a historic gold for Indian badminton. Their men's team also reached the final and took silver, featuring Lakshya Sen, HS Prannoy, Kidambi Srikanth and Arjun Ramachandran. And PV Sindhu, a two-time Olympic medallist, exited in the women's singles quarter-finals.

Now, two years later, BAI has decided to bring a 20-person squad to Japan, covering all five disciplines. On paper, that is a statement of ambition. But read closely, and this is a Games in which India has chosen to fight while holding — defending past results while introducing younger names.

The roster divides into three clear layers. The first layer is the star core: PV Sindhu in women's singles; the Satwik-Chirag pair in men's doubles. The second layer is the veteran men's singles contingent: HS Prannoy and Kidambi Srikanth — men who have carried Indian badminton through nearly a decade of ups and downs. The third layer is the next generation: Lakshya Sen, Ayush Shetty, and in the women's draw Gayatri Gopichand — daughter of head coach Pullela Gopichand and a two-time Commonwealth Games medallist.

And most of these athletes have just returned from Horsens, Denmark, where they helped India win bronze at the Thomas Cup 2026. A bronze at the most prestigious men's team event in the world — not a poor result, but not a peak either. It places them precisely in the familiar middle zone: strong enough to be expected of, not strong enough to be certain of.

Three coaches, one big question mark

This is the detail I consider the most important in the whole story, and it sits rather deep in the press release.

According to the support staff list published by BAI, the Indian badminton team for the Asian Games 2026 is led by head coach Pullela Gopichand — the man who built an entire era of modern Indian badminton. But beside him stand two foreign names: Irwansyah, from Indonesia, and Tan Kim Her, from Malaysia.

For someone covering badminton in Malaysia, the words "Tan Kim Her" carry their own weight. I have stood outside training halls in Kuala Lumpur, watching him teach movement patterns to Malaysia's men's doubles pairs. I have heard him explain why a doubles pair cannot win on raw power alone — there must be structure, there must be rhythm, there must be someone behind and someone in front. In doubles badminton, what we call tactics is not found in the hardest smash; it is found in the moment when one player knows where he must stand as his partner prepares to smash.

At the same time, Irwansyah brings experience from Indonesia — the country regarded as the cradle of world doubles badminton. The fact that one federation invites both an Indonesian and a Malaysian specialist to support its doubles programme is no accident. It is a diagnosis. India is telling itself: our weakness compared with Asia's powerhouses lies in doubles structure, in rotation, in the fine detail of positioning.

I once got a name wrong three times, just to learn that naming is the most sacred of things. A federation does not invite two foreign doubles coaches merely to decorate a list. They invite because they know that among the four men's disciplines — singles, doubles, team, and mixed combinations — the most achievable gold still lies with the Satwik-Chirag pair, and they do not want to waste that opportunity.

There is a question of age

Let's talk about age. I do not have official data from BAI, but based on the publicly listed birth years of the players, we can sketch a picture. PV Sindhu was born in 2026 — meaning she turns 31 in 2026. HS Prannoy was born in 2026 and will be 34. Kidambi Srikanth was born in 2026 and will be 33. These are ages at which singles players can still compete at the highest level — but the price of a high-intensity attacking style becomes ever steeper.

Sindhu is tall, with a long reach and a game built on smashing and net interception. It is an effective style, but it consumes enormous physical resources and places pressure on knees, shoulders and lower back. At 30+, an attacking player faces an unavoidable question: can she sustain that intensity across three or four matches in a single week? And if she must play on day three of a team event, after a long flight, the answer becomes even harder.

Meanwhile, the veteran men's singles group — Prannoy and Srikanth — play an all-court control style with deception, quite different from pure power. That is valuable tactical material when building a team lineup: you have multiple ways to counter different opponents. But it also means the team depends on links that have already passed their peak form.

The younger generation — Lakshya Sen, Ayush Shetty — is the future. But the future is not necessarily ripe this year. India's squad is a transitional one, and that is a truth no press release wants to say outright.

I remember sitting in a training hall at the Pullela Gopichand Academy in Hyderabad in 2026, watching Sindhu practise lateral movement drills. She moved slowly, very slowly, one step at a time, as though trying to remind her body of something. At that age, athletes no longer learn new technique — they learn how to keep the old from decaying. That is a different battle, less glamorous, but no less cruel.

Twenty people does not mean twenty chances

This is the point I want to spend the most time on, because it is where the most common misunderstanding lies.

When a country announces a squad covering all five disciplines, the first media reaction is: "How comprehensive, how ambitious." But let us ask the opposite question: if you have 20 athletes, how many of them can actually win a medal? The answer is not 20. It may be 4 or 5. The rest are there to build, to learn, to hold places for the future.

A 20-person squad in Aichi-Nagoya has an appearance of even spread, but inside, medal probability concentrates on a few specific points. And the largest concentration is the men's doubles pair Satwik-Chirag. If this pair falls early, India's gold chance all but collapses into a narrow set of alternative paths — perhaps the men's team, perhaps some surprise in singles, but nothing certain.

There is a deeper paradox here. The Indonesian and Malaysian coaches were brought in precisely to strengthen doubles capability. But their presence also says that India's domestic doubles coaching pool is not yet self-sufficient. If India already had a world-class generation of doubles coaches, they would not need to invite Irwansyah and Tan Kim Her. There is nothing wrong with importing expertise — badminton is a global sport and knowledge transfer is normal. But it raises a question of sustainability: when the foreign specialists go home, what remains?

I call this the coaching gap — a concept that rarely appears in press releases yet is a real variable in the success cycles of smaller badminton nations. India has solved the problem by buying time. But bought time does not equal a self-operating system.

There is one more detail worth noting. Gayatri Gopichand, a member of the women's team, is the head coach's daughter. This is extremely common in national teams — a parent coaching a child is a tradition in many Asian badminton nations. But it also creates a sensitivity around impartiality in court-time allocation and squad selection. I mention this not to cast suspicion, but to point out that family structures in sport always carry their own weight, one that outside media often overlook.

The competition window: September, after the Thomas Cup

There is a scheduling detail I think few people notice. The Asian Games 2026 run from September 19 to October 4. That means they fall in the post-World-Championships window — a tournament usually held around August. For national teams with dense calendars, this is the period when accumulated fatigue begins to show.

But India has an additional factor: the Thomas Cup 2026 was held in Horsens, Denmark. That means most of their players have just been through a highly stressful international team event. Now, only a few months later, they enter a continental team event — where the pressure is no smaller, only the medal count larger.

The period from June (when BAI announced the squad) to late September sounds long — over three months. But during those three months, the players still have to compete on the BWF World Tour to protect ranking points and build form. They cannot freeze the squad to focus on a single target. That is the paradox of a tournament that carries no BWF ranking points: you want to commit fully to it, but you still have to earn a living at other events.

I once sat in an empty stadium in Kuala Lumpur in 2026, when tournaments returned after the pandemic. In the empty stadium, I heard the very particular pulse of data. The numbers do not shout. They whisper. And the way a national team manages its schedule in a compressed year whispers in the same way — you only hear it if you stand close enough.

On India, and a view from Southeast Asia

I sit in Kuala Lumpur writing about badminton for Malaysian readers. That gives me a perspective Indian colleagues may not have: seeing India as a rising power in the region, not as an established one.

From that angle, the most interesting thing is not the list of 20 names. It is that these lists show no clear model. For instance, India's women's contingent is far smaller than its men's. What does that mean? It suggests India's medal expectations lean toward the men — meaning men's doubles and the men's team. For a country seen as having a top women's star like Sindhu, that lean is somewhat surprising.

And here is what I want to stress: India is no longer a one-star power. They have a multi-layered structure — Sindhu, Satwik-Chirag, the veterans, the younger generation. But a multi-layered structure does not fully equate to a multi-directional strategy. In many cases, it means a team trying to keep every door open at once, and that demands an enormous reserve of mental and physical resources.

I remember once interviewing an Indonesian coach in Jakarta who had worked with men's doubles pairs. He told me something I have carried for years: "In doubles badminton, the best player is not the hardest smasher. It is the one who knows where he must stand while his partner is in the air." I think of that line when I hear Tan Kim Her has gone to India. Because what India lacks is not power — they have high-speed smashes. What they lack is positional memory. And that memory must be taught.

The wider context: Asia and the migration of know-how

There is something rarely mentioned in regional badminton coverage: nations compete not only with players, but with coaches. Over the past two decades, Indonesia and Malaysia have exported doubles expertise to many countries — Japan, India, Singapore, and even emerging European badminton nations. This is a quiet but long-lasting form of sports knowledge transfer.

When India invited Irwansyah and Tan Kim Her, they joined a current that has existed for a long time. But what is notable is that they did so at the same time as announcing a 20-person squad. The two moves together form a message: India does not just want to win one Games. They want to build a system.

And here is where I return to the coaching gap. A system is not built by inviting specialists — a system is built by training the next generation of people who can replace the specialists. With the inclusion of Gayatri Gopichand and Ayush Shetty, India is planting those seeds. But planting does not mean harvesting in the same season.

What to watch

Many numbers will be thrown around when the Asian Games 2026 begin. Rankings, contact rates, smash-winner counts. And we, who write about badminton, will once again read them as traces.

But the thing I want to watch is not in those numbers. What I want to watch is: when the Indian team steps into the closed meeting room before its first match, who speaks? Gopichand, the man who understands each athlete like his own child? Or Irwansyah with his doubles tactical board? Or Tan Kim Her with the movement drills he once taught Malaysia's men's pairs?

That is where I want to listen. Not on court, but at the door behind it — where laughter, breathing and fragments of conversation reveal who a team truly is.

A mistake is not a full stop, but a comma that lets the story continue. And within India's list of 20 names, the most notable one may sit in the appendix — not an athlete, but three coaches carrying three different passports. When the locker-room door closes, the real match begins. And India's match in Aichi-Nagoya will begin before the first shuttle is served.