‘I’d a lot of doubts – even if I still wanted to continue playing’ – Irish Olympian Nhat Nguyen on his career low

It made Nguyen question whether he wanted to continue playing badminton or pack it all in. To save his future in the sport, the graduate of St David’s, Artane, decided effectively to take a sledgehammer to the shuttlecock of his game.

This wasn’t how Nguyen foresaw the next step after he finished his first Olympics in Tokyo three years ago as a 21-year-old who immediately started talking about how useful his debut experience would be for the next two Olympic Games.

Close to the next decade looked mapped out for Nguyen, who moved to Ireland from Vietnam with his family when he was six. He was seen as a player who would carry the promise of Irish badminton in future Olympiads.

But the upward swing started running out of gas. Nguyen was always going to be in a position to qualify for his second Olympics, but the results began to dry up.

Towards the end of 2022 and into 2023, he knew things had to change if he wanted to be good enough to get out of the group stage at the Paris Olympics. He spoke with his coach, Davis Efraim, and parents, Thuy and Lai, and told them he was going to break down his game in the hope that putting it back together would make him a better player. It wasn’t about tweaking bits here and there. He’d gone past that stage.

“To be honest, it was a change of absolutely everything. Everything you could imagine, my technique, my fundamentals, how to serve, how to move correctly, how to be more efficient,” explains Nguyen.

“That took a while, that took a couple of months of just grinding it out feeling like you’re starting from zero again halfway through an Olympic qualification.

“Yeah, really tough time. I had a lot of doubts if I was even still wanting to play, that type of thing, because you’re starting from zero again.

“I was tweaking everything small before and it didn’t work. I felt like I was going nowhere. I felt stuck.

“You’re hitting a plateau type of thing, and yeah, a lot of difficult conversations needed to be had with my coaches, with my family. To even have that motivation or the extra motivation to start again, even though I’ve been playing this since I was six.

“The feeling of starting over was quite overwhelming at the start, but I had to really believe in myself and trust myself that it would pay off, and yeah, thankfully, it did pay off in the Irish Open, in the home tournament.”

The whole questioning of his game, even his future, drained Nguyen’s self-belief. He had been working with a sports psychologist since 2019, but the one thing he learned was the only person who could pull him out of this hole was himself.

“I lost a lot of confidence within myself for sure. I lost the self-belief, the drive, the motivation. When I was younger, I found motivation to go up to training. That was easy but this was very difficult. It was quite strange. I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was, but I just wasn’t myself. And then I realised something; I need to ask for help.

“Enduring those tough times, never giving up, still grinding, still having that mentality every single week, every single day to go to practice was not easy at all,” he says. Some days, I did not want to go at all. Some days I just wanted to be on holiday, but I’m really proud of myself that I came through that stage – not like I don’t feel like that now. It’s getting better, but I can cope. I can manage things a lot more on the mental side of things.”

Nguyen says travelling the world competing in badminton events can be “very lonely, for sure, but you manage.”

The now 23-year-old spoke in the past about his obsession with the sport but now realises how obsession can curdle when the thing you dedicate your life to is not playing ball.

“I definitely believe that turned into a negative. Once you’ve given so much to the sport and you’re just not getting the result or not getting what you feel you deserve. And I definitely learned how to wind down, how to take my mind off badminton, taking it step-by-step and trying to enjoy each moment at a time.

“I learned a lot to take things from a different perspective, to soothe my mind for sure. Because before, I was definitely way too obsessive with badminton.”

Meditation is one thing Nguyen practises to guard against badminton consuming him. He talks to his father, Lai, and asks him if he was struggling when he was the same age and his dad tells him he moved to Ireland when he was in his early twenties, so that gives his son perspective.

Nguyen doesn’t know exactly where his form is at now, but his results over the last six months have been an improvement on the previous six months. He badly needs some competition before he travels to Paris. When he competes in events in Canada and the USA at the end of this month, it will be two and a half months of practice with no competition.

“Right now, where’s the form? We’ll see in Paris, but I’m feeling quite optimistic. I’m feeling confident in myself. We’re putting in the work and [I’m] exhausted every single day. So, I’m really just trying to give my all, every single day.

“So form-wise? I don’t know. We’ll see. I guess that is a good thing.”

The risk Nguyen took with changing the way he plays more than halfway through an Olympic cycle may not be a risk at all.

It also kept him in the game.