Brief - The Hustle

Meet the badminton star who is the 7th-highest-paid woman in sports

Written by Wes Schlagenhauf | Sep 23, 2020 2:09:29 AM

Badminton? More like goodminton.

Alright, now that we got that out of our system, according to Forbes, Indian badminton star, Pusarla Venkata Sindhu (better known as PV Sindhu), earned a total of $8.5m between June 2017 and June 2018.

That puts her ahead of Romania’s Simona Halep (the world’s top woman tennis player) who made $7.7m, making PV the 7th-highest-paid woman in sports. And she’s only 23.

How to make money in badminton: Part 1

Born in Hyderabad, Sindhu started playing badminton at age 6, but it wasn’t until the 2016 Rio Olympics that her life changed forever, becoming one of only 28 Indian athletes EVER to medal at the Olympics, and the first EVER to win silver.

That’s when the tickle cash started rolling in.

At first it was prizes: she received $1.7m from proud Indian state governments. She was also awarded land from the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana government and a luxury BMW car from the Hyderabad Badminton Association.

Part 2: sponsorships

Sindhu earned close to $500k from her badminton winnings, but her real money comes from endorsements — after medaling, companies flooded in to get her name on their brands including big labels like Gatorade, Bridgestone, Nokia and Panasonic.

According to her agent, she gets an endorsement fee of about $178k a day, the second highest in the country after India’s world-famous male cricket captain, Virat Kohli.