Ines Castillo, 1.64 tall, with long limbs, quick reflexes, runs from one side of the court to the other, hits the feather hard when he attacks, subtly when he has to save it from the ground, jumps, stretches his elastic body, holding the racket with the right hand. She is 17 years old, she is playing the 2017 Pan American Youth Championship in Canada. She did not win any medal that time, she lost in the round of 16, but the match she played against the Canadian Talia Ng made the coliseum vibrate, the public chanted her name.
Inés Castillo (22) made badminton a priority in her life for five years. Photography: John Reyes
Scenes like this are not so common on open signal television. The badminton It is not a popular sport like soccer, it does not cast a spell on the crowds, but it is enough to go to YouTube to watch a game to be hooked for a good while on the so-called sport of the feather that, silently, has been leaving Peru in style .
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In the last edition of the Bolivarian Games held in Valledupar (Colombia), the national team of badminton He won ten medals between gold, silver and bronze. And of those ten, Ines Castillo, 22, won four gold medals in all the modalities she competed in: singles, ladies’ doubles, mixed doubles and teams; In addition, she was crowned the ninth athlete with the most medals in the competition.
“What characterizes Inés are her physical genetic conditions, she is very fast and has a very strong intensity, that is something that cannot be molded, either you have it or not.”, says his trainer Christina Aicardi.
The young badminton player is happy with her victory, however, she does not believe that this was her best performance in a high-performance competition. Her last great feat, she says, was at the Cali-Valle 2021 Pan American Games where she won a bronze medal: “It was a high-level championship that covered all of America, whereas in the Bolivarianos only some South American countries compete”. Dissatisfaction is a trait that characterizes her.
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The multi-medallist – who has been practicing this sport since she was 10 years old due to the influence of her father – confesses that she was a very shy teenager, that she did not have a presence on the court and that she was not used to celebrating her points. She was not competitive, she says, like the tennis player Rafael Nadal, and she knew that if she wanted to be an elite athlete she had to develop that quality: “To be one you don’t have to be satisfied with just playing well, you have to want to win. It’s not that you lose and nothing happens.”
The psychological preparation was important to develop Inés’ self-confidence, who suddenly began to become more visible on the pitch, to celebrate her points, to be more arrogant: “You can’t be humble on the court, you have to respect the game, of course, but you can’t be a very good athlete unless you were born with the perfect technique; it was not my case”comments.
trick the brain
Although the badminton it requires a careful physical preparation to resist the one or even two hours that a match lasts, and to develop speed and explosive force; it is also a discipline that requires a meticulous work of the mind. “In badminton it is important to work on emotional management, attention and concentration, reaction speed”says Rafaela Pacheco, a psychologist from the Peruvian Badminton Federation.
In the Bolivarianos, for example, Inés had to deal with the desire to play in a coliseum near Bogotá, located at more than 2,600 meters above sea level. The height seriously influences both the player’s physique and the speed of the pen, the tactical plan must be adapted to the new circumstances: “At height the game has to be attacking, hitting the pen down, not making long rallies. Imagine that the feathers of the steering wheel must be bent to make it go slower, ” says the athlete.
The badminton player began in the feather sport at the age of 10 due to the influence of her father. Photo: John Reyes
To acclimatize, the Peruvian delegation traveled to Colombia a week earlier. While the mental work was done by Inés through the psychological technique of visualization: “It consists of mentally recreating a situation, using the most information from our senses so that the experience is as real as possible”Pacheco says. Days before the competition, Inés says that she reviewed the blow or the play that would add points: “It’s like tricking the brain. It helps performance a lot, but it has also happened to me that I have overthought the game and it hasn’t gone well”.
And badmintonista You may have trained to perform 100 percent in competition, but if your head is not trained and you lose concentration, you can lose the game in seconds. Feeling the racket in her hand, drawing attention to that sensation, is another strategy that Inés practices to return to the present and focus on the game. And to recover from a defeat and face frustration, the badminton player draws on her iron persistence: “I go to training even though I don’t feel like it, it’s very necessary not to lose discipline”.
Inés’ four gold medals are not the product of short-term training: “For today’s results, she has been preparing for years. She is one of our most dedicated players, doing ten to eleven sessions a week.”, says his coach. It must be remembered that at the 2017 Santa Marta Bolivarian Games, Inés won a silver and a bronze medal. In Valledupar she had her revenge.
On the podium wearing his gold medals. Photo: John Reyes
“Watching a live badminton match shines more – says Inés when we comment on the videos of her competitions uploaded on the internet – it is a very dynamic sport, it is not like athletics or swimming, which can be monotonous. And, unlike tennis, in badminton you run all over the court.”
The badminton player has all her attention focused on the Badminton World Championships to be held in Japan next August. The Asian continent is characterized by having the best, because there the sport of pen raises passions. Soon we will see Inés, elastic, fast, making her shoes squeak on the track and adding more medals for Peru.
Inés Castillo (22) made badminton a priority in her life for five years. Photo: John Reyes
