Sandra Babu is a long jump and triple jump athlete from Kerala’s Kannur district. She was training hard for the World U20 Athletics Championship that was to be held in Nairobi this July when the pandemic struck. The championship was postponed. Babu should have been crestfallen, but she has instead just upped the ante. The feisty 18-year-old is now determined to make it to the Tokyo Olympics, also postponed to July 2021. She could not have made it to Tokyo this time, but now she gets an entire year to prepare for qualifying.
The postponement of the Olympics, for the first time in its 124-year history, was a deeply disappointing setback for many sportspeople, but many others have just been spurred to think bigger. They are determined to use this grace time to make an extra effort and catch that flight to Tokyo. Athletes who did not make the cut when the qualification doors were opened earlier now get time from December 1 this year to June 29, 2021 to make the grade.
Watch | Indian shooter uses flat as a makeshift range
Raring to go
Kerala’s 18-year-old long jumper, Ancy Sojan, and West Bengal’s 22-year-old middle distance runner, Lili Das, are among those who are raring to take a serious shot at qualifying. Stars like javelin throwers Neeraj Chopra and Annu Rani, and long jumper M. Sreeshankar, all stand to gain from the delayed Olympics. “Both Chopra and Sreeshankar were actually in very good shape already; they could have come up with good results this year. But they might be able to do even better in 2021,” says Volker Herrmann, the Athletics Federation of India’s High Performance Director. “I would say it [the postponement] is an advantage for us. We have a very young team, which I think is a huge opportunity for us because these athletes now get another year to train.”
In her town Kelakam, Babu goes about her fitness drill and strength-building workouts with extra vigour. She is aware that she has to jump 14.32 m to make the cut — 21 cm more than any Indian has ever done. Mayookha Johny, with 14.11 m set in 2011, holds the national record. This does not rattle Babu’s seasoned coach, T.P. Ouseph. He is busy monitoring her progress online, from Perumbavoor in Ernakulam, 270 km away. “If everything goes well, she will qualify for the Olympics. Her chances are good; I would say 80%,” says Ouseph. “As far as the triple jump is concerned, it is easy to reach that range.”
The 73-year-old Ouseph, a former Air Force long jump and triple jump champion, has coached some of the country’s finest female jumpers — including long jumper Anju Bobby George, the country’s lone medallist in the World Championships, and Bobby Aloysius, former Asian champion high jumper, in their early years. He is confident he can work magic with Babu too.
He expects her to touch 14.40 m within a year. “She is capable of doing it if she does not have any injuries or other issues,” he says. “My target for Sandra is medals in the Asian Games, Commonwealth Games and the Olympics.”
Go for gold
Neeraj Chopra, world No. 4 in javelin throw, is the candidate most likely to bag India’s first-ever Olympic medal in athletics. The delay increases his odds because many of the world’s top throwers, including top-ranked Magnus Kirt, Andreas Hofmann and Olympic champion Thomas Rohler, will be entering their 30s next year.
Chopra, 22, is an Asian Games and Commonwealth Games champion. He was also the 2016 Junior Worlds gold medallist. He had to miss an entire year because of an elbow injury and surgery, but his 87.86 m effort in January this year in South Africa, which helped him qualify for Tokyo, is a sign of what he could throw next year.
Annu Rani, Chopra’s female counterpart, is the 27-year-old national record holder who became the first Indian woman to enter the javelin throw final at the Doha World Championships last year. She is someone else who is rather thankful for the postponement. “The rescheduling is very good for me,” she says, confident of qualifying as soon as the Indian season opens and travel restrictions are lifted. “Since I don’t have competition here, it helps me to go abroad where there are throwers close to 68 m. There will be a great improvement when I train and compete with them over the next year, she says.
And the others
Outside track and field, 2019 has been a fantastic year for Indian shooting as well — a sport that has given the country its lone Olympic gold medallist in Abhinav Bindra, in Beijing 2008. Youngsters such as Manu Bhaker, Elavenil Valarivan, Divyansh Singh Panwar and Saurabh Chaudhary are in brilliant form, and would have cherished an Olympics this year with the dreams of multiple medals it carried for them.
Bhaker, 18, will still be one of the stars to look out for in Tokyo, but as she pointed out recently, she was at her peak this year, just before the pandemic. Shooting is a strange sport, a bit like golf, where you suddenly find your swing going awry after playing like a champion, possibly because a lot of it is in the mind. Bhaker and the others seem worried about the long break and what it will do to their focus. It will be interesting to see how composed they are at Tokyo 2021.
As for Magnificent Mary Kom, the woman with the most medals in World Boxing Championship history, she had planned to quit after the 2016 Olympics, but decided to continue when she failed to qualify for Rio. Now, with another delay, Kom will be 38 in Tokyo, up against opponents who are more than 10 years younger. The bronze medallist in the 2012 London Olympics, when women’s boxing made its debut, competes in the 51kg flyweight category in the Olympics, but has been more comfortable in the 48kg class where she won the last of her six World Championship golds in 2018.
Britain’s Nicola Adams, the two-time Olympic champion who beat Kom in London, retired last year, but there will be many others in Tokyo who’ve beaten Kom in the last year or so. China’s Yuan Chang, the 2018 Asian Games gold medallist, who beat her in the Asia-Oceania Olympic qualifiers semifinal in Jordan in March, has qualified, while Turkey’s Busenaz Çakıroglu, who beat her in the 2019 Worlds semifinals, is expected to make the cut through the European qualifiers, which will begin as soon as the global lockdown ends.
There could be two World champions at her heels too: Taipei’s Huang Hsiao-Wen, the 54kg champ, who has slimmed down to make it to the 51kg category in Tokyo; and Russia’s Liliya Aetbaeva, the 51kg champion who is expected to pick up one of the European berths.
In badminton, Saina Nehwal — the first Indian shuttler to win an Olympic medal with a bronze at London 2012 — is anxious. The player who made Indian women believe they could beat the all-conquering Chinese is not so sure she can make it to Tokyo in 2021. She is 30 and might have pulled it off this year, but it gets tougher now. Nehwal has exited in the first round in three of five international tournaments this year, and her last major victory came last January in the Indonesia Masters after an injury forced Carolina Marin to quit early in the final.
After becoming World No. 1 for the first time in March 2015, a year when she also won the World Championship silver, Nehwal was expected to win her second Olympic medal at Rio in 2016, but made a shocking early exit. She had a knee surgery soon after, but came back to win the bronze at the World Championships in 2017 and the Commonwealth gold the next year, beating P.V. Sindhu in the final. With all competitions closed and her world ranking slipping to 20, it will be a rather anxious Nehwal who tries for a 2021 berth.
The postponement is thus quite a mixed bag, opening some doors but threatening to close others. All the athletes are nonetheless chafing at the bit, waiting impatiently for the lockdown to end and to hit their training strides again.
