BHUBANESWAR: “IF there is anyone,” Vinesh Phogat tweeted on Friday, “I want to see doing really well at #Tokyo2020, it’s @TheHockeyIndia ladies. These superwomen are amazing.”
The wrestler may not know this but the women’s team owes a significant debt of gratitude to athletes like her. In a roundabout way, they may have not qualified for the Games if not for her. The ending to this particular story took place over two nights at the Kalinga Stadium where the women’s team punched their Tokyo tickets thanks to a 6-5 aggregate win over USA. But let’s rewind back a bit.
The 2016 Olympics has just finished and the women have been humiliated: P: 5, W: 0, D: 1, L: 4, GF: 3, GA: 19, Pts: 1. On the sport’s biggest stage, they were treated like a boxing bag. Radical changes had to be made and Hockey India acted swiftly, bringing in Wayne Lombard as scientific advisor.
One of the immediate things in the South African’s to-do lists was to improve their fitness as well as strength and conditioning. It was easier said than done. Captain Rani Rampal picks up the narration. “No one worked on the scientific aspect of the game,” Rampal says. “We would go through exercises but it wouldn’t be scientific. When Wayne first arrived (in March 2017), he noticed that the team wasn’t physically strong. His reaction was: ‘Oh my god, where have I landed’.”
This is where Phogat and India’s other leading women’s athletes played a key role in changing the perception surrounding physicality in female athletes. “He showed us examples of Mary Kom and Vinesh and we realised that if they could last so long, why can’t we? If they can achieve with their fitness as girls, even we can.” Giving examples, however, is just one part of the solution. The bigger challenge was to successfully sell the idea to Rampal and Co. Lombard picks up the story.
“(When I first came), the important thing I wanted to change was the perception on strength and conditioning. It’s okay if you are stronger, that it is okay to have a strong physique as a female athlete.” The former Head of Athletic Performance at China Hockey also had to tell them that it was okay to use that physicality to compete against the rest of the world.
How did the buy in happen? Like magic, results and performance started improving. They triumphed at the World League (Rd 2), beat South Korea in a three-match series and won the Asia Cup a few months later. That this happened within six months of their new training regimen convinced them that they were on to a good thing.
When results started improving, the team did not feel the need to be cowed down whenever they saw hockey athletes from western countries. They knew they had the skills, now they also had the endurance and staying powers.
The improved yo-yo test scores backs this sentiment. “Our first yo-yo test (in March 2017) was about 17-17.5,” Lombard says. “That’s low. Eighteen is the bare minimum.” Now? “We ran our best yo-yo scores before the England tour (September-October 2019) where the team average was 19.5.” Some transformation.
The true change, however, happened in 2018. The players, who had by now been exposed to different cultures, got used to the idea of being confident. They didn’t shy away from expressing themselves even if meant that they had to use their physicality to win challenges, ride tackles or glide past defenders.
“In three years, they have done a lot of travelling and exposed to different cultures,” Lombard says. “The perception started changing when they saw that they were getting stronger and weren’t getting pushed off the ball.”
As a consequence of the above, the team also improved in another key area — ‘high speed running’. If a player, in a match, covers more than 4.5 metres per second, “that’s one high-speed effort,” according to Lombard. This year, the focus was to get players to “repeat these efforts over and over again.”
In fact, their training sessions the last few months was planned in such a way to “peak for these two matches.”
Spoiler alert. They managed to ‘keep running’, as Marijne summed up after the second of the two-legged qualifier, ‘even in the last quarter’, to punch their ticket to Tokyo. Maybe they will share a bus with Phogat there and exchange stories. Saturday’s result: India 1 USA 4. Aggregate: India 6 USA 5.
Through after almighty scare
“What’s going on?” This was the phrase coach Sjoerd Marijne was asking himself as his wards sleepwalked through the first 30 minutes against USA in the second leg of the Olympic qualifier on Saturday. There was no cohesion in the pitch as the visitors hounded, harassed and erased the four-goal deficit with 32 minutes remaining. The stress lessened a bit after Rani Rampal got a goal with 12 minutes to go.