Will it be Super Saturday for India?
With some of the top medal hopes in action on the opening day, India’s Tokyo 2020 campaign could get off to a bright start
The hopes are rising, and the pressure mounting. India’s big day at the Olympics —a Super Saturday if you will— could well be the first day of the Games. This is the first time in India’s sporting history that seven athletes in four different events will go in with a real chance at winning medals.
And not just winning medals, though that would be historic enough, but doing it with an air of redemption.
Redemption for a top lifter who, in a moment of weakness could not clear even a single attempt in one category of her event in Rio 2016, where she was one of the favourites.
For India’s vaunted shooters, who returned without a medal from Rio, the first time in four editions of the Games when an Indian shooter did not stand on the podium.
For Deepika Kumari, for long one of the best archers in the world, exiting in the second round at her second Olympics.
Each of these events has medals on offer for India on Day 1, and in each discipline, the Indians competing are ranked in the top three in the world.
That includes Kumari, the world No 1 women’s archer, at her third Olympics. And Mirabai Chanu, the world No 2 in the women’s 49kg category in weightlifting, who failed so spectacularly in Rio and has improved in leaps and bounds.
Pellets, barbells, bows
The Asaka Shooting Range is a temporary venue which has been reorganised to comply with the standards of the 2020 Olympics. Yet, it’s rich in history. Tucked away in a corner of Tokyo, the range for the 1964 Olympics shooting events also stood here.
Relatively small, with 60 lanes, it is a convertible range for both 50m and 10m events.
With 10m competitions starting first, training for 50m was stopped for the last couple of days to allow air conditioning to cool the range down.
That has come as a reprieve for the air rifle shooters, who perform wearing stiff, heavy attire. They went through their pre-event training comfortably on Friday.
It is at this range that the Indian shooters will be eager to bury the ghosts of Rio.
Over the past four years, a burst of young talent, nurtured by former India players, have taken the shooting world by storm.
In 2019, India swept the shooting world cup cycle for the first time, leaving behind powerhouses such as China, Russia and the US.
So terrific has been the run of Indian shooters in the last four years, that they enter this edition of the Games as contenders in several categories. On Saturday, the best of them will be on show—abhishek Verma and Saurabh Chaudhary, seeded 1 and 2 in Tokyo in men’s 10m air pistol, and Apurvi Chandela and Elavenil Valarivan, seeded 1 in the women’s 10m air rifle.
They go into their events not just as contenders, but the ones to beat.
Far off in another part of the city, Chanu, too, will look to finally get over the heartbreak of Rio. This time she takes the stage as the world record holder in clean & jerk, the category in which she failed to lift all three of her attempts in Rio. Talk about turning things around.
And in yet another part of the city, Kumari will pair up with Pravin Jadhav for the archery mixed team event.
All of these athletes have come to Tokyo with a solid preparatory phase behind them. The shooting team isolated itself for two and a half months in Croatia in a training camp when the brutal second wave of the pandemic swept through India. Chanu trained for large parts of this year and the last in a famous lifting gym in St Louis, USA.
A lot riding on them
A lot will ride on how the young shooters perform on the world’s biggest stage. Eleven of the 15-member team are making their Games debuts, including Valarivan, who rose to the top of the most competitive event in Indian shooting. She booked her berth for the Olympics with two world cup golds, and even the world championship silver medallist, Anjum Moudgil, could not make the cut for the event (Moudgil is in the team for a different event though, 50m rifle three-positions).
Valarivan and Chandela, who were at the top of their form in 2019, have struggled in 2021 when global shooting competitions restarted after a pandemic-enforced break in 2020. Valarivan did not qualify for the finals in her last two world cups, and Chandela had to contend with regaining her posture and form after losing weight and not fitting into her original shooting gear.
No Indian woman shooter has ever won a medal for India. A qualification score of 630 will be good enough to enter the eight-shooter final and after that it will be anybody’s game.
“It will all come down to who handles the pressure better,” said rifle coach Deepali Deshpande.
In air pistol, Chaudhary and Verma are in the best possible space. The 19-year-old Chaudhary, an Asian Games gold medallist at 16, has so far shown no signs of being nervous on the big stage.
Whether at small competitions or big, he shoots with the same inscrutable look on his face, in a zone of his own, with metronymic accuracy.
The two top competitors in the category are China’s Pang Wei, an Olympic and world championships gold medallist, and South Korean great and four-time Olympic champion and world record holder Jin Jong-oh. Chaudhary has beaten Jon-oh to second place at the Asian Games. Iran’s Javad Foroughi, who won back-to-back world cup golds before coming in to Tokyo, is also in great form. Verma, the 31-year-old lawyer turned shooter, whose steep rise in the sport—he only picked up a gun for the first time when he was 25 years old—is a story of inspiration and obsession, has also been in medal-winning form in recent world cups.
In archery, Deepika Kumari will not get to pair up with husband Atanu Das, who finished 35th in the individual ranking round on Friday.
The top male archer for India was Pravin Jadhav at 31st, and the archery team made a last-minute change based on form to pair Jadhav with Kumari in mixed team, an event making its debut in Tokyo. Kumari was 9th in the individual ranking round. The road to a medal is extremely tough for the pair. They will face Chinese Taipei, one of the world’s pre-eminent archery teams, in the first elimination round.
Avishek Roy HT In Tokyo
OVER THE PAST FOUR YEARS, A BURST OF YOUNG TALENT, NURTURED BY FORMER INDIA PLAYERS, HAVE TAKEN THE SHOOTING WORLD BY STORM