Indian shooters prepare for Tokyo by competing against each other in mixed gender eventsNEW DELHI: India’s Tokyo-bound air pistol and rifle shooters, who are currently on an 80-day training-cum-competition trip in Zagreb, Croatia, have found innovative ways to entertain themselves while staying focused on their ultimate aim to win medals at the upcoming Summer Games.
Preparing for an event as Olympics requires athletes to stay in a relaxed state of mind during their gruelling training schedule.
That’s what the country’s shooters did on a pleasant Saturday morning.
Devised by the coaches, a gamification technique was applied during training at the shooting range where eight pistol and rifle shooters were divided into four mixed-gender teams of mixed disciplines, having one shooter from each discipline.
The teams were named as Everest (rifle shooter Deepak Kumar and pistol shooter Yashaswini Deswal), Leo (Elavenil Valarivan, rifle and Abhishek Verma, pistol), Champion (Divyansh Singh Panwar, rifle and Manu Bhaker, pistol) and Challenger (Apurvi Chandela, rifle and Saurabh Chaudhary, pistol).
The four groups played a mixed team, mixed-discipline game on Saturday, with proper qualification rounds, competition final-like music, announcements and the eventual gold and bronze medal matches.
While the fun part was added to keep the shooters in good spirits – both physically and mentally – on this long tour, the competitive spirit stayed intact.
“Such gamification techniques in training have been applied earlier and it really lightens up the mood.
It also brings out the natural competitive juices, besides promoting strong team bonding,” national rifle coach Deepali Deshpande said.
Each shooter had 30-shots each in qualification and then the top-two highest scoring teams played the gold medal match while the other two competed for the bronze, with all four teams starting together.
Team Everest won the gold 10-8, defeating the Leos.
Team Champion of Divyansh and Manu settled for bronze with an identical victory margin over the Challenger.
“It was highly competitive.
Among other things it helped the pistol shooters improve further, given they want to be more accurate in order to make up for the advantage of the rifle shooters,” national pistol coach Manoj Kumar said.
Apurvi, who will compete in the women’s 10m air rifle event at the Tokyo Games, said the activity was rewarding.
“We didn’t quite finish on the right side today, but it was good fun.
It throws a different kind of challenge and competing with people you generally don’t compete with, certainly brings out a competition-like feeling.”