With the Tokyo Olympics carried out and cleaned and focused had shifted towards the 2024 Paris Olympics, Indian Junior Archers would seek to make their signs in the Archery World Youth Championship will be held in Wroclaw, Poland, from Tuesday.
The event, which should take place in Australia but shifted to Poland because of a pandemic, will see as many as 24 archers from the country participating in more than 500 archers from 57 other countries.
Talking about the preparation of the team ahead of the event, Indian coach Purnima Mahanato said, “The players have trained hard and all expected to do well.” Even though he did not want to burden young people, Mahanato had high hopes of the recurve junior men’s team consisting of Parth Salunkhe, Aditya Choudhary and Dhiraj Bommadevara.
Of the three, Parth and Aditya have also cut the archery world championship which will be held next month.
Another archer to cut the two events was Jharkhand Komalika Bari.
He won gold in the cadet category when the event was held in Madrid in 2019 and will now take part in the Junior category.
He also won two gold at the recurve women’s team in the arrow of the world arrow in Guatemala and later in Paris but failed to make pieces for the Tokyo Olympics and it hurt him.
All he wanted was to qualify for the Paris Olympics which was only three years old.
“Winning gold is very good but lost at the Olympics very breaking,” he said.
“60% of my technique is good but I have to work on the remaining 40%.
Also, I have to make sure that I don’t make the same mistake again.” Jharkhand Archer also worked on his mental strength to be well prepared for big events.
“The psychologist gave me a task and I finished it every day.
Then I tried to implement it every time I compete,” Bari said.
While Indian archers are expected to do well in Tokyo, they failed to bring medals with disappointing performances.
The focus now will naturally shift towards children about how they continue to lead to the next Olympics.