Stars glitter on Indian Sports Honours awards night
“As cricketers we don’t get many awards but it always feels special when you get nominated or get an award,” said allrounder Hardik Pandya while India football team captain Sunil Chhetri looked forward to meeting other sports personalities during the inaugural Indian Sports Honours (ISH) function.
The initiative was launched by Virat Kohli and Sanjiv Goenka’s RPSG, and the awards function was held on Saturday evening .
Sania Nehwal, PV Sindhu, Kidambi Srikanth, Prannoy Kumar, Pullela Gopichand, Sania Mirza, Mahesh Bhupathi, Ashish Nehra, Zaheer Khan, Umesh Yadav and Ravichandran Ashwin were all present.
Bollywood stars Aamir Khan, Akshay Kumar, Siddharth Malhotra, Malaika Arora Khan were also there.
Kohli said “the days of being a one-sport country are behind us”.
“Definitely it’s been a fantastic year for me so far,” said shuttler Srikanth, who has won four Super Series titles in 2017.
National badminton coach, P Gopichand, said: “It’s been a great year. To have the rankings (that) we’ve is great. Srikanth has been fantastic. Only his performance could overshadow somebody‘s like Prannoy’s, who also has been fantastic.”
Prannoy said the success of players is rubbing off on each other. “With all these guys performing well… that has been a great motivation for the entire batch. Saina, Sindhu are doing well,” he said.
“We have four good singles guys now, Prajnesh, Sumit, good times,” said Davis Cup captain Mahesh Bhupathi. He backed Yuki Bhambri to bounce back from injury and said the next two years will be critical for Ramkumar Ramanathan.
Sania said it was tough to pick a woman sportsperson of the year. “We’ve had so many great women achievers in the last year or so,” she said.
Chhetri said India must build on the successful staging of the FIFA Under-17 World Cup. “The best part was team unity,” he said on the Indian U-17 boys’ team.
Kohli may have excused himself from being chosen for any award, but he was the cynosure of all eyes as he walked in hand-inhand with Anushka Sharma.