With just eight months to go for the 2020 Olympics, we take a look at the athletes who have qualified or secured India a berth at the upcoming Games. As the winter break approaches, the number does not paint a flattering picture...
During sports minister Kiren Rijiju’s seemingly endless sojourn of various sporting institutions spread across the country, there was one line in his stump speech that drew a tad more applause than the rest. It was the one about how India was hoping to have its best-ever Olympic performance in Tokyo. It was in line with an earlier assertion of his, that India was going to send a biggest-ever contingent to Tokyo.
However, with just over eight months separating today from the opening ceremony in Tokyo, it appears the road to record number is fraught with immense challenges. India had sent 117 participants to Rio. Right now, the number of Indians who have qualified for Tokyo stands at 60. Of course, there are more chances in athletics — right now, the number stands at a dismal six.
The shuttlers will add another seven or eight names to that list when the draw is released. A few paddlers will eventually get there too. But India’s best-case scenario right now involves matching or marginally bettering last edition’s touring party. Four years on, our best hope is maintaining status quo. For a country that’s slowly coming into its own on the world scene, with boxers, wrestlers, shuttlers and shooters winning medals at recent world events, this is perhaps an indication that all recent success has been attractive papering over a cracking wall.
Another one of the more ambitious claims that the sports minister has made in his speeches is that India will aim for a top-ten finish at the 2028 Olympics. Right now, however, this seems improbable. Forget top-10, take Canada who finished twentieth in Rio. They sent a party of 314 athletes in 22 sports to Brazil and they brought back 22 medals. A total of 142 Canadians have already booked their Tokyo tickets.
Perhaps it’s not the inferiority in numbers but the one in number of disciplines participated in that ought to worry the stakeholders. In the 1996 Atlanta Games, where Leander Paes won India’s solitary bronze, the contingent had 49 athletes in 13 disciplines. Two decades later in Rio, that number was 117 in just 15 and we returned with two medals. We know the wrestlers and the boxers get the best possible attention. But what are we doing to develop those sports that India’s not good at? When will India send a netball or water polo team to an Olympic Games and when will they go there with hope of medalling? Why hasn’t a single swimmer broken out on the world stage in all these years? Why is the only fencer still in fray to qualify for the Olympics — CA Bhavani Devi — still not on the Target Olympic Podium Scheme list? Sports like cycling, swimming and gymnastics need to be developed for medals tally to swell.
At the turn of the millennium, Great Britain, still smarting from a dismal Atlanta Games where they won just the one gold, decided to invest heavily in their cycling programme. Funded by their national lottery, they invested in some of the best coaches and sports scientists in the world. A steady increase in cycling medals followed and by 2016, the 26 cyclists they sent to the Games brought back 12 medals, including six gold (up from four in 2004). That was the result of twenty years of structured planning. Rijiju & Co will do well to take a bunch of pages from their book.
Time for medals now
T’S a process that’s lasted more than 400 days. What was kickstarted by Anjum Moudgil and Apurvi Chandela at Changwon in September 2018 was completed by Angad Bajwa and Mairaj Khan at Doha last week. In all, India’s shooters won a record 15 quotas; the number could yet soar depending on world ranking spots at the end of the qualification process (July 2) next year.
As it stands, the shooters look odds on to carry their form into the Olympics. India lead the medals table in World Cups in 2019 and with the National Rifle Association of India (NRAI) putting in a place a stringent monitoring system to avoid a debacle like Rio (zero medals from 12 berths), the chances of them firing blanks looks unlikely. Chief among the contenders will be Chandela (World No 1 in women’s 10m air rifle), Rahi Sarnobat (World No 2 in women’s 25m pistol), Saurabh Chaudhary (World No 1 in men’s 10m air pistol)) and Abhishek Verma (World No 2 in men’s 10m air pistol).
Even if the athletes win places for the country and not for themselves like it happens in other events, it’s almost a guarantee that the above-mentioned four names will be on the bus, barring injuries or an alarming drop in form. They have consistently medalled in big events over the last 12 months. That they also won quota places in the respective events reflects this.
In fact, it looks likely that most of the athletes who won berths may end up going to Tokyo. For example, it’s hard to not pick the likes of Manu Bhaker (women’s 10m air pistol) because she has consistently been breaking world record scores in qualifying apart from doing well in the final as well.
Considering that Chaudhary and she also have an enviable record in the mixed 10m pistol event — a competition making its debut at the Summer Games — NRAI will be keen to include her. The one genuine piece of intrigue is to see if NRAI allots a couple of the 15 quotas to trap. They did that in Rio but it did not bring the desired consequences. So they may even opt to not do that this time.
Wrestling still one of India’s best Olympic bets
Indian wrestlers won a record five medals at the World Championships held in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan from September 14 to 22. The medal haul also meant the wrestlers bagged the highest-ever Olympic quotas for the country so far — four.
With two more qualifiers — Asian Continental Qualification Tournament in Xian, China (March 27-29) and World Qualification Tournament in Sofia, Bulgaria (April 30-May 3) — still to go, there are chances for the numbers to swell.
Since 2008, wrestling has been the most successful and consistent Olympic discipline for India with grapplers winning four medals in three editions. Wrestling has been an integral part of the sporting spectacular ever since the first modern Olympics was staged in 1896. It also fetched independent India’s first-ever individual medal when Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav won a bronze at the 1952 Helsinki Games.
Both the stakes and hopes will be high this time. Bajrang Punia (65kg freestyle) and Vinesh Phogat (53kg women’s wrestling) will be the brightest prospects when the competition begins at the Makuhari Messe Hall in Chiba on August 2 next year. Deepak Punia (86kg), who became India’s first junior gold medallist at Worlds, will also make his Games debut. But that does not take the medal contender’s tag away from him given the silver he had won in Kazakhstan.
Ravi Dahiya (57kg) surprised all by pocketing bronze in Kazakhstan and he along with Deepak will leave no stone unturned to make their maiden Olympic outing a memorable one. “We (Deepak and me) will train in Russia for almost a month along with new Belarusian coach Murad Gaidarov as a part of our preparations for Tokyo Games,” Ravi told this daily.India’s most successful wrestler Sushil Kumar and the 2016 Rio Games bronze medallist Sakshi Malik, the lone Indian woman to medal in Olympics, though could not book Olympic berths in Nur-Sultan. But the duo along with talented Pooja Dhanda (57kg) and Divya Kakran (68kg) will be keen to make an amend when the qualifiers begin next year.
A successful outing in Tokyo will also erase the bad memories from their Rio campaign, which was mired with controversies including the ugly war of words between Sushil and Narsingh Yadav (74kg). Narsingh later tested positive for banned drugs forcing India to go unrepresented in the weight category.
Long night but dawn imminent
While Indian archery has been in the news for the wrong reasons in the last couple of years, there was one silver lining this year — India’s recurve archers won a three quotas for the first time since the 2012 London Olympics. Tarundeep Rai, Atanu Das and Pravin Jadhav reaching the quarterfinals of the Worlds back in June.
Very few expected a team quota considering the below-par showing of the recurve archers in the recent past. The last time the team reached the final of a world event was at the Wroclaw Stage IV World Cup in 2014. For a gold-medal winning show, one has to go back to the World Cup Stage IV in Shanghai in 2010.
One of the reasons for this had been the ever-changing nature of teams being sent due to the selection policy. Apart from Atanu, most archers had very less experience of shooting under pressure. But the new rules have helped with experienced archers like Tarundeep and Jayanta Talukder (Asian Championships) returning to the fray.
“The tweaking of rules has been a welcome change. Now we are close to finding the best combination. Hopefully, now we can all kick on,” one of the senior archers said.
The three-member quota means the archers are eligible to compete in both team and individual events. However, the women are yet to do so and time is running out. The girls have two events left to secure their place for Tokyo. While the upcoming Asian Championships in Bangkok which starts from November 21, has individual quotas on offer, the Berlin World Cup will have team quotas.
Potential, but can they?
In terms of pure competition to get to the Games, the Indian men’s hockey team had the easiest imaginable path. The sides they faced were sub-standard and it was never a question of if. The Men In Blue scored 46 goals in seven matches that took them from Bhubaneswar to Tokyo.
In a sense, where they truly stand will be known in the opening weeks of next year. Their inaugural Pro League campaign sees them play Belgium (world champion), Netherlands (world cup runners-up) and Australia (reigning Pro League champions) before February is out. If they manage to complete that run without losing, coach Graham Reid can afford to at least start planning for the quarterfinals in Tokyo. If not, he may have to tweak a few things.
The women’s team will also be on the bus to Tokyo. One of the most improved Indian sides, they had to survive a US scare in the two-legged qualifier but they have a much higher ceiling. With Hockey India having planned an elaborate preparation schedule, do not rule out the women getting into the knockouts. With Tokyo expected to be on the hotter side, it will help them immensely. One of the fittest sides in the women’s game, it could easily come down to the last team standing and Sjoerd Marijne’s charges can make a decent fist of that challenge.
With more support staff likely to follow — an analytical coach for starters — they do have the potential to also surprise. They showed that at the World Cup last year. Now, the challenge is to replicate that three years after stinking the place in Rio.
Quality over quantity for athletics in Tokyo
For a nation crazy about statistics, the number of track and field athletes who have made the Tokyo cut so far doesn’t look impressive. Apart from KT Irfan (race walking) and Avinash Sable (steeplechase), only the six-member 4x400 mixed relay team has qualified for the quadrennial event. Four years ago, a total of 34 qualified in 19 different events. It was also India’s largest-ever (117) contingent. But what was the end result? Two medals and none of them from athletics.
Now comes the question of whether the goal is to match the number of participants from Rio or to focus on those with a slim chance of finishing on the podium? Quality over quantity to be precise. The Athletics Federation of India (AFI) president Adille Sumariwalla feels the same way. “In London, 14 people qualified. In Rio, it became 34. But all of them just about qualified. So you cannot expect them to win medals. There is no point if 50 or 60 people qualify and don’t bring back anything. We now know what our athletes are capable of. Our focus is not on the numbers. We want them to finish as high as possible,” Sumariwalla told this daily.
After a successful Asian Games last year, many believed that Indian athletes are truly stepping up to compete with the best. But one look at the performance of some of the athletes at the Doha World Championships in September hints otherwise. Even elite Indian athletes are struggling to match their personal bests. Injuries and controversies have plagued preparations. But with time left, Sumariwalla feels the numbers will improve. “The relay teams (men & women) are in a good position ranking-wise. So that’s another 12. Dutee Chand is really close and so is PU Chitra based on ranking-points. There are other athletes too.”