500 days to Paris

So we actually surpassed our previous best and had undoubtedly our best ever Olympics in the aberration year 2021 (finally) in Tokyo. Neeraj Chopra probably demonstrated to India's budding athletes that if you stay honest to your sport and give your best every time, fairytales do happen.

Nearing two years to that unbelievable high and exactly 500 days ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics, and on a day when India's Olympic Queen P.V.Sindhu suffered her third consecutive first round loss from a major world tournament, the heart yearns for more. Yes, still and for even more.

But will Paris deliver or will Tokyo2020 remain an aberration in every possible sense? Only time will tell. Let's try and envision till then, once again as realistically as possible, as to exactly where we stand today.

The Badminton medal onus has now surely shifted to the doubles pairs. One of Sat-Chi or Gayatri-Teressa seem to be our best bets on current form. Singles no longer looks like a realistic expectation.

Today also saw the opening ceremony of the women's world boxing championships in New Delhi. The Indians at home looked fit and hungry to roar. However with both the women's and men's pugilists put together, we still have not moved beyond a couple of medal hopes where around 20 are the maximum that can be garnered.

In Athletics, Neeraj continues to be a contender naturally but a couple of long-jumpers answering to the names of Jeswin Aldrin and Murali Sreeshankar have raised some genuine hopes. Tejinder Toor is also around and is becoming an experienced international shot-putter. Athletes like Aishwarya Mishra and Shalini Singh have also made noises. Long very long calls still.

Hockey we continue to blow hot and cold and you still never know despite a tremendous run of four wins at home by a new-look team against the likes of Germany and Australia. Shooting continues also to be at you never know status.

In the others where we have traditionally hoped for Olympic medals, none including Archery, Golf, Tennis are any better hopes than they ever were.

The biggest tragedy at this point however is Wrestling, where things have come to a complete halt with India team selectees are not going for tournaments to represent their country. 

A double-digit medal haul should have been the bare minimum as a fan expectation after Tokyo2020. It will take huge work in 500-days to get there I think, although a meeting to discuss the same as already happened last month, which one has to admit, is an improvement from earlier times.

We can match our best Olympic effort at Tokyo 2020!

With the Australian Women's Softball Team being the first set of athletes to land in The Land of the Rising Sun, Japan, on June 1, 2021, the much anticipated Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games seems to be finally happening. Finally because it almost did not and certainly not in its original year 2020 because of the Cover-19 global pandemic. But now in 2021, with the pandemic not quite still eliminated, the Games look to be on track, albeit under unprecedented rules and regulations, prime among them being the absence of international visitors to the Games.

Be that as it may, the rules will once again be same for all participating Athletes, and we fans can trust them to get the gloom off the globe, come July 24, 2021.

But what about our dear India and its Olympic prospects?? Time for predictions now, but first a bit of analysis.

Let us look at some of the realistic medal prospects- the kinds that can win a medal in any top flight international competition on their day and have done so multiple times before. It is difficult to predict a Sakshi Malik kind of medal, but a P.V. Sindhu kind can certainly be taken into consideration.

Lets begin with our national sport of Hockey. Both the Men's and Women's team are participating, the Men for the 20th time in the Summer Games, and it is the Men who look more the medal prospects than the Women. They have trained throughout the pandemic and have also had some good competition and results traveling against defending Champions Argentina. But the Games will be a different ball game and the first target would be to make it to the Quarter-finals stage from the six-team group, where we will be up against former Champions and three-time World Champions Australia, Asian Games Champion Japan, and the likes of New Zealand who have given us grief before, besides the Argentines themselves.

Then there is Saikhom Mirabai Chanu in the Women's 49kg Weightlifting, which at this stage looks like a certainty. She holds the world record in clean and jerk, which she achieved just three months before the Games and with the likes of North Korea, Malaysia and Thailand not there for various reasons, she looks good for even Gold.

Wrestling, another traditional strong sport for India, has four men and four women qualified for India. It will be fair to say that among them Bajrang Punia and Vinesh Phogat are the overwhelming favorites for medals, even Gold, but other young talent like Deepak Punia in the 86kg, might be the surprise package.

Of the nine-contenders in Boxing, another sport where India has won medals in recent years at the Games, Amit Phangal in the terrier 52-kg weight and Pooja Rani among the women in the 75-kg class, look the brightest prospects on recent form and performance. Vikas Krishan and Mary Kom also bring a lot of experience to the contingent, but in the Games we always tend to favor the young ones.

In Archery, Badminton and Table Tennis, India have four contenders each. 

The husband and wife pair of Atanu Das and Deepika Kumari lead the challenge in Bow and Arrow in the individual recurve. Deepika has been a perenial  prospect now, but Atanu has shown sparkling international form with a first World Cup stage gold in Mexico recently and is going into his second Games, which bodes well.

World Champion P.V.Sindhu leads India's Badminton challenge and will always remain a contender at the Big Ones. Say Praneeth is in the Men's Singles while Satwik Sairaj Rankireddy and Chiraag Shetty make up an exciting new young Men's Doubles pair who are set to have a long career beyond the Games.

Table Tennis has the old warhorse Sharath Kamal along with young and exciting Sathiyan Gnasekharan for company in the Men's Singles while Manika Batra and Suthirtha Mukherjee will look forward to an Olympic experience.

There is also a lot of talk about Neeraj Chopra in the Men's Javelin in Athletics, Bhavani Devi in Fencing and Foouad Mirza in Equestrian, but will they be ready for such a HUGE occasion is the big question. Someone like Neeraj has not competed in the top flight for two years now and that cannot be the best way to prepare for the Games.

That brings us to Shooting and here India sends a very competitive 15-member squad. All the 15 on their day have won medals at the highest level of the sport. In particular the likes of Saurabh Chaudhary and Elavenil Valarivan seem unstoppable and in a zone at the moment and with the back-up of the Mixed Events, look very good prospects.

The likes of Pranati Nayak in Gymnastics, Nethra Kumanan in Sailing as also K.T.Irfan in Race-Walking will be disheartened at a passing mention as well, but at this big a stage, they really do not have performances or pedigree to go vie for a medal, one feels.

That kind of sums up our medal prospects, including the very long shots and remember, everything has to fall in place for everyone during the Games for us to maximize on our potential. And the whole world will be giving their very best of course.

My guess therefore is that we will win between 5-6 medals including Gold at the Tokyo 2020 Games. Yes, we can certainly match our best ever effort of the London 2012 Games. Amen to that!

Sports is finally back in India....long road ahead!

 It took more than seven months for competitive sporting action to finally resume in India, with the All India Football Federation (AIFF) taking the lead by hosting the Hero I-League Qualifiers 2020. The tournament got underway in West-Bengal on October 8, 2020. It features five teams competing over 10-games in 11 days for the lone spot to get into the Hero I-League 2020-21 season, effectively now the Tier-2 League in Indian Football.

While due credit needs to be given to the AIFF, seven-months and counting is a long time to stay away from competition and it will take at least six more months from resumption for players to get into top gear. 

Take the IPL for example. The generous dollops of extra-flab on some players have been topics of banter and internet chatter in recent times. Although the four football teams on show on October 8th appeared relatively better-off, but that is probably due to the different nature of the sport as compared to T20 cricket.

Meanwhile, crowds have begun to be allowed in international sporting arenas all across the globe. Bundesliga has allowed it. The European Super Cup game between Bayern Munich and Sevilla was played in front of a 10,000 strong crowd. Even the French Open Tennis major is currently underway with restricted crowd entry. Over across in Japan as well, restricted spectator entry has been allowed in baseball and football and Pennsylvania state in the US as of today has allowed crowds of up to 7,500 back in their stadiums. Plans are also afoot in countries like Australia and England.

Meanwhile international sporting action is also increasing by the day. The Denmark Open resumes international badminton action from October 13 with four Indians- Kidambi Srikanth, Shubhankar Dey, Lakshay Sen and Ajay Jayaram competing. There has also been two world records smashed in Atheletics when Letesenbet Gidey of Ethiopia and Joshua Cheptegei of Uganda broke the Women's 5000m and the Men's 10,000m records quite comfortably in a meet in Valencia, Spain. Formula 1, Moto GP, Cycling, Basketball, Golf and Chess are some of the other sports that continue to see top level competition.

Which begs the question as to what about the others? When will popular Olympic sports like Archery Shooting, Hockey, Volleyball, Wrestling, Weightlifting, Boxing, Table Tennis, Swimming, Rowing, Equestrian etc. resume? When will any sporting action apart from the Football, begin in India? Not all are contact sports. Is there a date? Is there a roadmap? No one even asks the questions nowadays. Least of all, the players, who should be the primary losers.

Why the Covid-19 impact will be tougher on the Indian Athlete

Almost exactly a year ago, I was lamenting the bleak prospects of Indian athletes at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games, which would have been, if not for the raging global Covid-19 pandemic, underway now.

But with varying forms of Lockdowns being imposed in various parts of the world since January 2020 and an otherwise averseness towards gatherings and congregations, the quadrennial grand celebration of Sport has been postponed by a year, a huge decision by the International Olympic Council (IOC), a rarity in itself (only the fourth time it has been done) in the 124 years of glorious Olympic History. Eventually the correct one, one has to say.

Now more than six months since it was first detected in Wuhan, China, the pandemic continues to ravage lives and livelihood around the world, albeit in very few nations on a large enough scale. Sports and athletes were an obvious casualty in all of this. No Olympics! No Wimbledon! No Champions League! That in itself says a lot. But spare a thought for India's top athletes. The pandemic has been and will continue to be far tougher on them. Here is why.

India imposed one of the most brutal nationwide lockdowns on March 24, 2020, with about 500+ cases recorded all across the country at the time.  Though intentions were to break the chain of transmission and shore up medical infrastructure, they did not prove enough, with the result that the entire country of close to 1.4 billion people have been in various forms of Lockdown (now called Unlock) for nearly five months now.

With severe restrictions on inter/intra-state travel and movement, as also the need to stay safe, India's top athletes have been majorly limited to doing training routines from their homes and/or accessing personally or locally available sporting infrastructure, as best and as much they can. Even a college sophomore would tell you that that simply would not be enough for them to get back their competitive edge in international sport.

On the other hand, their global competition has a head-start. There is a Cricket Test series now into its third Test, going on in England, the world's leading golfers including Tiger Woods have already teed off on the PGA and European Tours, major Football leagues in Europe are in full-swing and even top level Tennis has had more than a couple of Tournaments played. Ok, if you want to get specific about Football, leagues all across Asia in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Syria, Japan etc. are also in full-swing.

Even though most international competition in every other major Olympic sport is not scheduled to resume before September, elite athletes of most top African, Asian, European and South American,  nations have resumed training in full-swing and in some cases competitions as well. Hardly do people in India know that there was a competition called the Impossible Games in Oslo in June where top athletes from even Kenya, besides Europe, were able to compete in long-distance races. Or that our very own Shraboni Nanda (who is based there) competed in the Velocity Fest athletics championships in Jamaica along with the best sprinters of the world. Or even that athletic competitions have already happened or are currently on in places like Austria, The Netherlands etc.

Some Governments have gone the extra mile. Colombia, for example, have already packed-off 150 of their Tokyo 2020 bound athletes to Spain for training and competitions. Brazil, as hard hit by the pandemic as India, also has a similar plan finalized for 200 of its top athletes.

International sport in the best of times is a tough tough grind. And if you find yourself in it as the most rusty and lacking in competitive edge, it could mean the proverbial mountain to climb and the results disastrous.

There was a video recently doing the rounds posted by India's top paddler Sharath Kamal, where he appears like schoolboy talent making inexplicable errors, having resumed sparring after almost four months. If this is the state of India's best paddler and one of its most experienced international athletes, you can imagine what it would be for the rest of the crowd.

1 Year to Go for Tokyo2020 and its gotten Worse!

First of all, believe me when I say that it gives me no joy to be the harbinger of rotten news. But the Indian Olympic movement of which I am perhaps the most passionate proponent, more often than not compels me to be so.

Social Media all around today is celebrating the "1 Year to Tokyo2020" theme and right from the host city to around the globe, the spirit is efusive. So it is in India, but with close to nothing to celebrate on the Olympic Sporting front...or lets say...nothing new to celebrate on that front....which is not good news for our prospects at Tokyo 2020.

Since my last post, we have had a new (and might I add young and energetic) Sports Minister and the fact that, that is the only new development I have to share on the sports front is a giveaway.

The scary part being that the list of medal hopefuls I had listed down just three months back, has further pruned itself down. To be fair to the new Sports Minister, he has already started talking in terms of the 2024 Games.

Folks and fans might be wandering what went wrong. The simple answer to that is nothing went wrong. Just that nothing changed. Just that everything remained the way it always used to be. Politics, nepotism, blinkered vision, corruption, biased scouting and selection....just the regular things.

Therefore the results will remain the way they always used to be as well.

A Look at India's Tokyo 2020 Medal Hopefuls & How They Stack Up!

It is about time that you have a fair idea of your medal hopefuls at the quadrennial celebration of sports we call the Olympics. With Tokyo 2020 over a year away and qualifiers and quota events well underway, here's a peak into India's medal hopefuls as they stand.

Archery

Deepika Kumari is still our best bet and what a fairytale that would be if the two-time Olympian and former world number one is able to keep her tryst with an Olympic medal at Tokyo. A prodigious talent she played her first Olympics at the age of 17 and after having humbling experiences at both her Olympic appearances, she showed glimpses of becoming a hardened pro with her World Cup Gold over a classy field at Salt Lake City last year. If anyone can take on the might of the Koreans and Taiwanese and Russians and Chinese among others, it is she.

Athletics

Well K.T. Irfan the workhorse race-walker from Kerala, became the first Indian athlete to qualify for Tokyo 2020, which automatically qualifies him as a 'hopeful' however he has to deliver super-human improvement in his timings if he has to even think of a podium finish. But Irfan is an honest athlete and we wish him all the best. Neeraj Chopra and Hima Das are the only two serious medal contenders as things and their respective throws and timings stand. If comparisons are made with the previous Olympics, then it is certainly an improvement for Indian athletics, but still one would like to believe, not good enough.

Badminton

This has to be the biggest shock as after a brilliant decade of upswing, sudden stagnation has stepped in to Indian badminton and on current form, India is looking at only one medal hopeful in the form of P.V. Sindhu, who incidentally was also the sole medal winner last time around. One would have thought that Tokyo 2020 would have seen an Indian badminton squad full of world beaters and multiple medal hopefuls, but it is not to be certainly as far as Tokyo is concerned.

Shooting

Shooting, on current form and results has to be the brightest hope for a medal at Tokyo for India. Cynics would say, so was it last time around and we all know that the Shooting squad came back empty-handed, however in the practical world of sports you cannot discount consistent world beating performances and high world rankings. Indian shooters currently hold three world records in Olympic events and that is, beside being unprecedented for the sport in India, no mean feat. Apurvi Chandela, Saurabh Chaudhary and Angad Sir Singh Bajwa are the athletes holding them and if you add someone like the classy Anjum Moudgil to the mix, there is no reason why India cannot renew its date with an Olympic medal in Shooting.

Weightlifting

Mirabai Chanu will take forward a long regional tradition and given a self-imposed Olympics ban by Thailand, is the lone and foremost medal hopeful for India in the sport in Tokyo. A former world champion, which means she knows how to win on the big stage and having shifted seamlessly into a higher weight category, this 24-year old from Manipur looks good for an Olympic podium, all other factors working for her till D-Day.

Wrestling

Those in the know swear by woman wrestler Vinesh Phogat, however on current form only Bajrang Punia ticks all the boxes of an Olympic medal hopeful. Consistent over two world championships spread over five years and having won medals at almost every top level competition, the 25-year old world number 1 in his 65 Kg category from Jhajjar, Haryana, looks a prime contender for an Olympic medal. He has not only improved technically but has also displayed the right frame of mind to put it across any opponent on a wrestling mat. With a solid pedigree and support system to back him, his medal seems a certainty if ever the term can be used for sport.

Given the situation, an improvement over Rio 2016 is what India should be realistically targeting come Tokyo 2020.

'Khelo India' is here but 'Jeeto at Olympics India' still looks distant

'Khelo India' was the recent big ticket sports policy implementation with an eye to achieving Olympic Glory, undertaken by the country. In a nutshell it was a kind of Junior National Games organized in the capital involving school going athletes amidst much fanfare, as is the norm of the times. While the intent is to be lauded, the fact that 'its the best idea they could come up with'  should be a cause of concern.

This is the year when we get into the proper Olympic cycle for Tokyo 2020 and Rio 2016 still looks so recent. Soon Tokyo 2020 quota and qualifying events will begin and before you know it the Olympics will be upon us again. How much have we progressed in our quest for Olympic glory? What are the chances in Tokyo?....or beyond?

It will be safe to comment at this point that Tokyo will not be our best ever Olympic year. That would mean surpassing the six medals we won in London 2012, which looks quite improbable, to put it bluntly. There is good news coming through in sports and we probably have also been able to maintain the rising graph, but Big Wins, specially in Olympic events continue to elude us, which is a problem. Those Big Wins uplift a total ecosystem of athletes and administrators both financially and psychologically. Gives us the chance of having more than one medal hopeful in a given sport and therefore a better chance at medals overall.

Take Badminton for example, by far our strongest Olympic sport for a while. Outside the Olympics, The All England, the World Championships, Asian Games and Asian Championships are the Big Four in World Badminton to win apart from the Thomas, Uber and Sudirman Cups at the Team level. India still have a complete blank in all of the above in recent times. Sindhu and Saina no doubt have come the closest to winning Big and you cannot hold anything against those two masterclasses....the bottomline however is, we haven't won. I think the Commonwealth Games is the best that we have won apart from the BWF series events, which we are very strong at but they are basically pro tour events with very low memory-value globally. So that needed to happen before something pleasantly unprecedented could be expected in Tokyo. Recent performances at the Badminton Asia Championships do not inspire that confidence.

A pleasant development has been a Bronze by Aruna Budda Reddy at the Gymnastic World Championships in Women's Vault. 'Veteran' Ashish Kumar also reached a final at the World's which basically tells us that there is now a semblance of a gymnastics system perpetuated in the country. Its a breakthrough medal and no mean feat make no mistake about it- being the first for the country at a World level competition. Gymnastics gives you a shot at a lot of medals at the Olympics and its being an addition to the our list of medal hopeful sports is a good development. Kudos to all those responsible to bring it to this level. Am sure there is a long way to go still but at least a start has been made.

Shubhankar Sharma has also burst into the world Golf scene with two magnificent victories on the European Tour across two continents and both away from home at the ripe young age of 21. His emergence along with Anirban Lahiri's continued impressive showing on the world leading PGA tour bodes well for the sport's chances from an Indian perspective at Tokyo. The Golfing graph of India has also been on a consistent upswing at a global level and we fans can take heart but again that Major victory, those big wins on the PGA Tour remain elusive, which leaves a medal in the Olympics more to chance than conviction.

The other 'strength' Olympic sports of India like Archery, Wrestling, Boxing, Shooting, Tennis, Weightlifting and Hockey are in a state of stagnation, as in either at the same level globally or a few notches down from their peaks which is the major reason for my predictions for Tokyo. The odd good news will trickle through at times in these disciplines, but nothing which can make the fan really excited on Olympic prospects. Women's tennis and Shooting have shown some spark at junior and youth levels and it remains to be seen how the lot progresses.

What is happening at a real slow pace, inhibiting the progress of the Olympic movement in the country, is access to quality infrastructure and training. The odd facilities are found nowadays mainly in urban pockets but clearly it needs to happen across the length and breadth of the country in a planned and systematic manner with clearly defined targets. In the hinterlands its still more passion than programme.

What is killing our Olympic prospects further is the proliferation of sports agents, before a system of achieving real global success at a consistent level has been formulated. The buying and selling of players as commodities for commercial gains, is taking precedence over everything else. Take the example of a Dheeraj Singh- the India U-17 goalkeeper who earned a name for himself with some eye-catching performances. The fact that he had a long way to mature before trying his luck at the tough pro-football lands of Europe was fairly evident. But he took the call to abandon regular game time with senior professional squads and instead hunt for a trial call from any however nondescript 'european brand' club. This is clearly 'agents' at work in the search for quick money. Someone's got it all wrong.

So till the above anomalies are corrected, lets keep the passion going and hold on to the few sparks we have, because thats the best we fans can do.