India National Thread

[Kiruphagaran 1]

3 hours ago, tirtha22 said:

Dont know this is noteworthy or not but today it was pointed out by a sports daily questioning some mysterious reasons as to why players like Saina , Jwala and now Kashyap are leaving Gopi's academy and shifting their base.

May be gopis training is too rigorous and his method is prone to injuries or there are too many to look after for him. So they are not getting individual attention. He has mentioned he wanted to train under fitness coach Deckline Leitao.

Edited August 25, 2016 by Kiruphagaran

[tirtha22 233]

Football

 

Indian team for Puerto Rico match

 

GOALKEEPERS: Subrata Paul, Gurpreet Singh Sandhu, Amrinder Singh

 

DEFENDERS: Rino Anto, Sandesh Jhingan, Arnab Mondal, Keegan Pereira, Chinglensana Singh, Pritam Kotal, Narayan Das, Fulganco Cardozo.

 

MIDFIELDERS: Vinit Rai, Eugeneson Lyngdoh, Dhanpal Ganesh, Pronay Halder, Jackichand Singh, Isaac Vanmalsawma, Bikash Jairu, Udanta Singh, Halicharan Narzary, Rowlin Borges, Alwyn George, Germanpreet Singh, Md. Rafique, Arjun Tudu.

 

FORWARDS: Sunil Chhetri, Jeje Lalpekhlua, Sumeet Passi.

[Govind 9]

On ‎8‎/‎23‎/‎2016 at 09:41, Dolby said:

You can post it anywhere you want. Once, I am done with all sports, I plan to collate all of them on my blog, so if you want you can wait and share link to that or post individual posts. I have no problem with either. 

 

 

Sir Analysis on Wrestling and Weightlifting & Judo too is pending...

[Steve_RP 5]

On 8/24/2016 at 22:49, Madhusudhan said:

They are making fools out of us... Never ever seen President of sports federation supporting an athlete involved in doping scandal to this extent... 

Actually that's the only heartening aspect in this fiasco.

We are very accustomed to seeing the apathetic behaviour of the federations.....the moment a controversy erupts, the federation bosses develop cold feet and hide their  heads like an ostrich....

Here, the WFI President has backed Narsingh right from the moment the controversy broke.....Whether Narsingh is innocent or not is a subject of a much wider speculation, but Im personally happy to see the relentless support he's getting from the federation....

 

[Prashanth 175]

Joshna looses in Rd2 of Hong Kong Open 2016 

Main draw matches of Ittf Bulgaria open starts today.
Saketh plays final round Qualification match today.
Sania n her partner are in SF of New Haven WTA.

Paes n his partner are in SF of the Winston -Salem ATP 250.

[Dolby 735]

Sorry for the delay. Continuing my assessment, Weightlifting:

 

I expected 1 lifter in each gender to qualify for Olympics. We did that. We came back strong in 2015 WC after a bad 2014 WC. We even came close to qualifying a second female lifter. (If Russia/Kazakhstan/Belarus were removed from WC rankings, there is a very good chance that we would have qualified 2 female lifters). 

 

Team selection was pretty straightforward. At present, Mirabai Chanu is our best lifter by a margin. She is capable of winning medal in Olympics/WC. She was a long shot for medal here as well. It was sad seeing her failing to register a lift in C&J. I feel that in Weightlifting, one should always try and get a valid lift, because even if you finish 4th or 5th now, there is a chance that in future you might get a medal. But, I understand that being too conservative is a difficult decision. When you are close to medal, you don't want to finish just outside medals and wonder what if I had started at a higher weight. She is still young and has the legend Kunjurani Devi as her coach, so she should get stronger from this experience. 
 

Rest of the team is also progressing nicely. I am confident that we will have multiple female lifters in Tokyo. 

 

Satish Sivalingam just edged Vikash Thakur to become our sole male lifter in Rio. He broke his PB in Olympics, which is always a good sign. 

 

In Men's section, we still have to cover a lot of ground. We need a good team of 4-6 lifters to have any chance of qualifying multiple lifters. There are a number of youngsters who are good and have won medals at Junior and Youth World Championships. With proper training, hopefully they will transition to seniors nicely and we would be in hunt for multiple quotas at Tokyo. 

 

Also, a note on those who are talking about how Mirabai would have won medal if she managed to lift equal to what she was lifting in training. In competition, there is tighter body control, so everybody lifts lesser weight compared to training. Also, more pressure in actual competition. 

[Dolby 735]

Wrestling:

 

Before Olympics, I expected 3-4 Freestyle, 2-3 Women's Freestyle and 0-1 Greco-Roman, so needless to say, I was more than happy with the qualification numbers. 

 

Now, before talking about Olympics, let me talk about the run-up to Olympics. Since his silver at London, Sushil was semi-retired and he had participated in only one competition: Gold in CWG. He also had to move up a weight class to 74 kg to accomodate Yogeshwar Dutt in 67 kg (Yogi had won Bronze in 60kg in London). This created a problem as Narsingh was improving greatly in 74kg. Sushil was injured or decided to skip WC in 2015 and Narsingh won the quota in his absence. Wrestling Federation of India, being star struck, promised Sushil a trial in 74 kg without thinking of consequences and going against its past practice. Now, there was a big time gap between WC and other qualifying tournaments, so no other wrestler had a problem with this promise. I think even Narsingh accepted it as fait accompli. But as other wrestlers started qualifying, there were demands for trials in their categories also. WFI now realised that there was no way it could hold a trial for only Sushil vs Narsingh. If it held that trial, it would have to hold trial for all the other quotas as well. Also, there would be additional hassles regarding who all are eligible for trials. So, it backed out of its promise. This angered Sushil and he went to Sports Ministry and courts to get a trial he was promised. By this time, Narsingh realised that WFI didn't want to hold trials and hence, he obviously also kept on insisting that there was no need for trial. There was nothing wrong in Sushil asking for a trial and Narsingh saying no to a trial. Both were correct in their stands. The problem was WFI. It should have declared a fair policy (trial or no trial) before Olympics qualifications began and stuck to it. If this results in Sushil not getting a trial, so be it. If this results in Yogeshwar losing to an unknown wrestler in trial and losing his Olympic berth, so be it. Stick to one policy during a cycle and modify it as needed for the next cycle. The only good thing to come out of this situation was that Sports Ministry (most likely out of fear of disappointing someone) refused to become a party to this decision. They rightly told that it was the job of WFI to select team and not Sports Ministry. 

 

Now, the other issue: Narsingh's positive test. I am not going to go into whether he took drug knowingly or unknowingly. I don't care. WADA rules are clear. He and his support staff hold full responsibility for everything he eats. I always said that once an athlete tests positive, s/he has to undergo a ban, even if conspiracy is proven. Sadly, a large number of supporters were not aware of this (not their fault). This created a huge public support for Narsingh which prompted even politicians to give support to Narsingh. ADDP got swayed by this popular support and gave an emotional decision in favour of Narsingh. This decision greatly eroded its credibility. Even after this decision by ADDP, WFI/IOA/Sports Ministry had a chance to correct the mistake. Someone should have stepped up and said that WADA will appeal the clean chit. CAS will ban Narsingh. Let us do damage control and send someone else. But alas, nobody wanted to take the unpopular stand and become public enemy. Now, conveniently whole blame can shift to foreign WADA/CAS for harassing an honest Indian and denying us a chance to win Olympic medal, when in reality, both were correct in their stand. 

 

Coming to actual Olympics, I never expected anything from our Greco-Roman wrestlers. Qualifying for Olympics itself was a big step for them. From here, we should aim to regularly win medals at Asian level before thinking of Olympics. 

 

In Men's freestyle, we only had 2 wrestlers: Sandeep and Yogeshwar. Both got bad draws. Sandeep faced Russian in first round and Yogeshwar faced Mongol (who would have won bronze if not for last second foolishness). I didn't watch Sandeep's bout so won't comment on it. Yogeshwar looked tired in his bout. It was sad that after winning 2 medals in London, we failed to win a single bout in Men's Freestyle in Rio. But, I feel that the pre-Olympics acrimony had a large role in it. 

 

The amount of progress we have made in Women's Wrestling is amazing. Sakshi showed great mental and physical strength to win multiple bouts after trailing. Its not easy to win a nation's first medal at an Olympics after so many legends and medal hopefuls have failed.  Vinesh had a good draw and could have won Bronze (I don't think she could have defeated Eri Tosaka) but alas, she got injured and had to withdraw from the tournament.  Phogat sisters have won almost all of our Women's Wrestling medals but failed to win our first Olympic medal. I am sure this will inspire Vinesh to come back stronger and win that elusive Olympic medal for herself, her sisters and her family. 

 

I think both Sushil and Yogeshwar will retire now. So, there will be a great void in our squad going forward. It is upto the youngsters to raise their standard and take Wrestling to the next level. Inspite of the incompetent WFI, I have hope. Sakshi's Bronze will inspire a lot of female wrestlers. We have good coaches (Mahabir Phogat, Satpal Singh and a few more). What we need is more depth in each weight class. Also, we need to work more on the higher weight classes. There are a number of young wrestlers who have shown promise and should improve in future. I hope after retirement, Yogi joins the team in a coaching capacity or opens his own academy. Road ahead is tough but the potential to grow is immense. 

Edited August 26, 2016 by Dolby

[Dolby 735]

Judo: We are nowhere near Olympic standard. In fact we only manage to win a bronze or two at Asian level. Unless something drastic happens, we will continue to get an Olympic quota (continental quota) and fail to do anything substantial at Olympics. 

 

Swimming: Our swimmers are improving a lot, especially our women swimmers. But, we are still so far from the top level, that a male swimmer dipping below A standard or female swimmer getting even B standard is a distant dream. Virdhawal, Sajan, Supriyo, Sandeep, Saurabh, Shivani and Maana are doing all they can. Hopefully, they will create the foundation on which future swimmers will achieve something. 

 

Table Tennis: We were able to qualify 4 paddlers only because of sub-quota for South Asia and withdrawal of top East Asian paddlers from Asian qualifiers. Once again, there is a lot of improvement but still a long distance to cover. 

 

I think that covers our squad for Rio. Among the sports where we had no participation in Rio, there are only a handful where we can dream of Tokyo:

 

Cycling: Some of our cyclists are ranked high in UCI World Junior lists (I still don't know how). In Deborah, we have a very good talent and with proper training, she has a decent chance of qualifying for Olympics. 

 

Fencing: I am including it mainly due to @Prashanth and his immense faith in Bhavani. She did come close to qualifying in Rio and hopefully, with more support and experience, will be able to qualify for Tokyo. And inspire other fencers to raise their standard. 

 

Sailing: We have qualified a boat or two for Olympics in the past. So, there is hope that we will be able to bounce back from this disappointment and again qualify for Olympics (through continental quota). 

 

Volleyball: Only team sport, apart from hockey, where we have a distant chance of qualifying. Women's team is still very far from top at Asian level and it will take some time before we even talk about Olympic qualification. Men's team is very inconsistent. We have fought well against top Asian teams and struggled against weaker teams in the same competition. Till we get some level of consistency, we have no chance to qualify. But, we are near the top 5 in Asia and are capable of closing the gap. I think before we need to focus on winning a medal at Asian Games first and after that think about Olympics. 

 

As far as other sports are concerned, it will take a miracle (I am looking at you Dipa) to come close to qualifying. Hopefully, someone will force us to dream big and break all the barriers to put some other unknown sport on our radar. 

 

- Jai Hind

 

 

Edited August 26, 2016 by Dolby

[Dolby 735]

On 25/08/2016 at 10:43, kapil857 said:

 

Great write-up but just a couple of counter-points. The diff between "tourists" at AG/CWG and Olympics is that to go to the Olympics, you have to qualify while to go to AG/CWG, there is no qualification process and India can send a certain number of max athletes to each and every event without any qualification crtieria. Thus, there is a logic to prevent "tourists" at AG/CWG but to just send all qualifiers to the Olympics. With that said, the relay team inflation by keeping Tintu/Nirmala/Anas out was plain ridiculous. Unfortunately it will continue till the authorities, the media and even the fans (even knowledgeable fans like some on this forum) keep caring about the size of the contingent as opposed to the quality of the contingent...

 

And as far as reading rules go, it will unfortunately never happen. It has been drained into the Indian psyche - both of authorities and the media - that rules are not final and meant to be broken (can speak on this based on personal experience of interacting with journalists on twitter as well as in Rio). Thus, doesn't matter if rules are clear, the authorities have to officially ask if they can be broken.

The reason I am sour about AG/CWG situation is that some of the standards put by AFI were better than our National records. Also, in some events, eventual medallists had worse timing than the standard put by AFI. Even then, I would not have brought it up if there was consistency and no inflation through relay team. 

 

Also, no issue if AFI had simply asked IAAF/IOC for a wild card. But a public petition looks silly. They should be smart enough to nudge fans to support these things and not give official support to it. 

[Dolby 735]

23 hours ago, Kiruphagaran said:

May be gopis training is too rigorous and his method is prone to injuries or there are too many to look after for him. So they are not getting individual attention. He has mentioned he wanted to train under fitness coach Deckline Leitao.

Saina did switch to Gopi as she wanted more personalised coaching, which Gopi could not give. The switch was beneficial as she reached World Number 1 after the switch. I have a feeling that she was carrying a niggle for quite some time and she was postponing rest/surgery due to Olympics. The switch to Vimal also gave Gopi more time to focus on others. So, win-win. 

 

Gutta/Ponappa have never made a secret of their issues with Gopi. They have accused him of not giving enough attention to doubles' coaching, too much interference in who pairs whom and also favouritism towards players from his academy. So, it was natural that they also shifted base to Bengaluru (In fact, they were forced to shift base as they have accused that in past they have felt unwelcome at the camp in Hyderabad with Gopi).