I had an extremely fruitful 2019. After beginning the year just outside the top 30, my hope was to break into the 25. My coach, S Raman sir, and I had one vision — to breach that top-25 mark. To go to a place where no Indian has gone previously was very special for me. It’s a great jump, I would say. I think the key was we worked on our processes. We didn’t have any secret plan, we just planned properly and knew we could crack it. We always worked on innovating, doing that even while winning is important. When you are winning, you think that you are doing well.
But in this tech world, everybody is watching you. The more you are in one place, you will start to go down. We kept innovating every two months, we kept adding small, small details and new things into the game. Be it serve, receive or attack. If that was the main challenge in 2019, 2020 is going to be a different beast. It’s perhaps going to be the most important year for me in terms of my career. I was no different from any other aspiring athlete, growing up I had dreamt of playing in the Olympics. If we do qualify, it will perhaps be the best feeling of all.
And knowing people expect us to qualify does put some more pressure, but like I always say, pressure is a privilege. You are performing, that’s where the pressure is coming from. That is something which is bound to happen and I take it in a positive sense. You should believe that you are good, that is why people have started to expect. Of course some performance pressure comes in but I really perform very well under tension. So the best comes from me in those kind of big tournaments. But just because it’s the Olympics, I am not going to put any extra pressure on myself.
I am going to trust the things that I did all this time to take me through. I always like to visualise myself playing in a big match ahead of a big tournament and that’s what I will do a lot of in 2020. I will probably imagine that I am playing a big night match in Tokyo against some of the world’s best players. I do this because then that feeling of unfamiliarity doesn’t happen when I actually land at the venue. This helped me a lot at the Commonwealth and the Asian Games so there is no reason for me to change this way of thinking. Saying that, it’s important to develop new skill ahead of the Summer Games.
You cannot go underprepared. So if we qualify for the Games in the tournament in Portugal in January, that’s what I will predominantly be doing. Preparing for the biggest two weeks of my life. I also like to take this opportunity to thank Go Sports, ONGC, TTFI, SAI and others for continuing to support me on this journey. Finally, I also wish all of you readers a very happy new year. Enjoy and have fun.