New Delhi: A fancied Indian archery squad leaves for Colombo on Monday to participate in the South Asian Games with the twin aims of boosting the nation's medal tally and to gear up for the December Doha Asian Games.
Eyeing for glory in the Doha event, the Indians have included all their big names in the nine-member SA Games team despite the weak quality of opposition and are the hot
favourites to make a clean sweep of the four gold medals at stake.
"Our rivals in Colombo can at best hope for silver and bronze. There is a huge difference in standards between India and other South Asian Games nations," a confident Indian team manager Abhijit Dasgupta said.
He said besides bagging gold in both men's and women's team events, the Indians are hoping to garner all the individual medals in the event which is the latest addition to the Games.
The Indian archers, fresh from the national ranking tournament in Kolkata, would reach Colombo on August 21 in the afternoon to acclimatise for the competition that begins on
August 24 at the Colombo Gymkhana ground.
The Indian challenge would be spearheaded by national men's champion Jayanta Talukdar and seasoned women's campaigner Dola Banerjee, who emerged winners in the Kolkata meet.
"However, our main target is the Asian Games where we will be up against Korean archers. And this tournament will provide us good match practice," Dasgupta said.
After being labelled for years as chokers for their inability to replicate in top flight tournaments the good scores they came up with in the practice arena, the country's archers have seen their performance graph rise in recent tournaments after the Archery Association of India decided to shift from the coaching camp module to the competition module.
The archers now play tournaments all round the year and the results were manifest in both Asian and world level tournaments of late.
Talukdar, now world number two, clinched the individual recurve gold in the FITA Meteksan Archery World Champonship in Croatia in March.
At the Madrid world championship last year, the men bagged the silver while the women secured the fourth place.
Incidentally, Banerjee is now the seventh ranked woman archer in the world.
"We have fielded the same team that came out with flying colours in the Asian team championship in Delhi last November," Dasgupta said.
After the Colombo Games, the archers would take part in the final selection trials in Jamshedpur (September 8-11) for the Doha quadrennial showpiece.
The senior team would then travel to Sanghai to vie for honours in the world cup from September 26 to October 10.
"Our preparations for the Asian Games are on track. And we are hoping for podium finishes," he said.
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