Deepthi Bopaiah is the Executive Director at GoSports Foundation, a national award-winning non-profit organisation founded in 2008, which supports junior, emerging, and elite athletes across Olympic and Paralympic disciplines. Formerly a wealth adviser and trainer during her 6- year stint at HSBC, Deepthi decided to cast her lucrative corporate career aside to pursue her passion for sports and has been with the Foundation since 2012.

Under her leadership, GoSports has grown from a small non-profit to a frontline sports organisation that specialises in the field of athlete management and currently looks after the holistic development of 126 of India’s finest athletes across 16 different sporting disciplines. Through its work, it has also managed to bring onboard sporting legends - Rahul Dravid, Abhinav Bindra, and Pullela Gopichand to give back and advise the best solutions for Indian Sport.

In 2019, the Foundation was awarded the ‘Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Award - National Sports Encouragement Award’ by the President of India, for identifying and nurturing young talent in sports.

The organisation aims to enable sports excellence by unlocking the potential of talented athletes and using it as a vehicle for social change, promoting inclusion, diversity, and empowerment through sport. It has supported 17 Olympians and Paralympians, including trailblazers such as Dipa Karmakar and Deepa Malik, who have broken barriers and become role models for many women in the country. It has also instituted the Para-Champions Programme, India’s first-ever programme designed to support the training and development of differently- abled athletes. With three out of the four medals for India at the Rio Paralympics coming from athletes under the programme, and securing 25 quotas already for the upcoming 2021 Tokyo Paralympics, it has significantly impacted the Indian Paralympic movement, and helped change the narrative around disability.

Over the last eight years, Deepthi has been at the forefront of developing, implementing, and promoting the Foundation’s work. Her efforts have been instrumental in convincing leading corporates and government agencies to support its programmes as part of nation-building through sport. She is also part of the expert committee for the creation of the National Sports Education Board and helping the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs to formulate a curriculum exclusively for student-athletes in India.