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P V Sindhu’s gaggle of cousins from Hyderabad remember her as the pesky 4-year-old who would land up at the makeshift badminton court in their residential colony and demand to be included in their games. She was as tall as her sister Divya’s racquets at that time, and would invariably be packed off home.

On Friday, an older and taller Sindhu announced that she had finally arrived at the courts, entering the semifinal of the world’s biggest badminton tournament, a frontier no Indian woman singles player has crossed before.

Playing in her first World Championship tourney, Sindhu took 55 minutes to put it past Shixian Wang 21-18, 21-17 in Guangzhou. The 18-year-old daughter of volleyball-playing parents from Hyderabad had on Thursday beaten the defending champion and world No. 5 Yihan Wang in straight sets.

The only other Indian singles player to have entered the semis of the Worlds is Prakash Padukone, who won the bronze in Copenhagen back in 1983. Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponappa won a doubles bronze in the last edition of the tournament in London in 2011.

Sindhu’s achievement has come at the back of a gruelling training regimen that she has been on for years now. Her father P V Ramana has endured a two-way 50 km commute twice every day from Marredpally in Secunderabad to Gachibowli, where coach P Gopichand has been putting her through the hard yards since the age of 9.

Sindhu has been waking up at 3.30 am since her pre-teens to

get to the academy in time for the earliest training batch that Gopi held for his juniormost wards. On the way back in the evenings, she would tumble on to the back seat of the car to catch up on sleep.

"Petrol costs would pinch back then. But more than that, our parents invested a lot of time in ferrying her back and forth," said Sindhu’s sister Divya. She spoke smilingly of the ’sacrifices’ the family made for Sindhu: "We never watched movies — because she loved movies — and we didn’t want her to feel bad about missing out. She was working very hard, and I saw how the quiet girl was turning into a big achiever. She didn’t start out in school very popular, but with her name appearing in newspapers, we knew she was headed for big things."

From her family, Sindhu inherited the athletic genes and the height of her parents; and from coach Gopichand and senior Saina Nehwal a healthy appetite for chewing up Chinese challenges. Ramana was a lethal spiker in volleyball, and Sindhu’s smashes have helped her beat the best of the Chinese over the past year.

"She missed out on her childhood, but she never complained because she loved what she was doing. She always had access to facilities, but she was breezy about the sacrifices expected of her," Divya, who lives in the US, said.

Sindhu’s dominant wins over the Chinese — she has now beaten their top three as well as their anticipated next big star Sun Yu — herald India’s boldest era in badminton.