The Indians breaking new ground in Tokyo
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2018 Asian Games 2018 World Championships
2019 World Championships
A wrestler who loves the big stage, there’s no major tournament in the last three years where Punia has not won a medal. He is the complete package: power, speed, and skills. Injury free and with lengthy training stints in the US and in various European nations with a strong wrestling culture ahead of the Olympics, Punia is in the shape of his life.
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Introduced to sport shooting by his parents as a way of breaking the teenager’s obsession with first-person shooter games, Panwar seems to have transferred his gaming skills into real-life talent. In 2019, he swept through the world cup cycle with four golds, a silver and a bronze out of six tournaments. He has a legacy to uphold—india’s only individual gold at the Olympics came in this event, when Abhinav Bindra won it in 2008. But Panwar is also one half of a formidable mixed pair with women’s World No. 2 Anjum Moudgil.
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Gold, 2018 Asian Games
Gold, 2018 Commonwealth Games
Personal Best – 88.07 metres
2016 Rio medal distances: 90.3, 88.24, 85.38
The javelin thrower, India’s first global track and field star in decades, has had a poor buildup to the Olympics. Yet he remains one of the world’s top throwers. With a 88.06 metre throw that won him the 2018 Asian Games gold and a 88.07 m throw at the Indian GP this year, he is inching closer to that elusive 90 m mark that only one man in the world, Germany’s
Johannes Vetter, hits right now.
Among the 120-odd athletes heading out to represent the country at the Tokyo Olympics are a sprinkling who have taken India into fields where no Indian has qualified before: sailing, fencing, swimming, running.
Before the Budapest Sabre World Cup in March, Devi’s mother was hospitalised in Chennai with Covid-19. Training in Italy, the Indian fencer was torn between heading to Budapest and returning home. “My mother told me from her hospital bed, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. You just focus on your game’. It struck me that the Olympics were not just my dream but also my family’s,” Bhavani Devi said.
That dream was realised. The 27-year-old sealed a Tokyo berth in the women’s individual sabre event to become the first Indian fencer to qualify for the Olympics.
The 23-year-old spent all of last year miles away from her home in Chennai, sailing around the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, homesick but determined to be battle-ready. At the Mussanah
Open Championship in April, she became the first Indian woman sailor to make it to the
Olympics, by finishing second in the Laser Radial event in Oman.
She marked another first by earning a qualification for the Games; the previous nine Indian sailors made it to the Olympics by filling in quotas.
First there were none. Then, over a couple of days at the Sette Colli Trophy in Rome last month, Sajan Prakash (200m butterfly) and Srihari Nataraj (100m backstroke) took Indian swimming into uncharted waters when they made the cut for the Tokyo Games with the “A” qualifying mark.
This mark guarantees automatic qualification. All the Indian swimmers who have participated in Olympics so far made it either via the “B” standard (where you get a chance if a swimmer with an “A” time pulls out), or through the quotas given to countries from where no one has qualified.
Sarthak Bhambri, Alex Antony, Revathi Veeramani, Subha Venkatesan and Dhanalakshmi Sekar are India’s first Olympic 4x400m mixed relay team, representing the country in an event making its debut at the Tokyo Games.
India made the cut at the 2019 World Championships in Doha, where the new format also caught the attention of the athletics world. The mixed relay has two men and two women racing from each team, but in no fixed order. Each team can determine its own arrangement.