Friday, September 21, 2007

Asian Archery Championships

Tried to post during the competition but my personal computer didn't work so had to use hotel computer which only typed in chinese so that was something i couldn't master... anyway will recap the situation...
It was a phenomenal Championship from the indian perspective. The men won the team GOLD for the first time in 18 years which was huge. We definitely had the best three archers there (Jayanta Talukdar, Rahul Banerjee and Mangal Singh Champia) and we beat all the top asian countries. It was also good for the women who finished with a bronze.
In the individual championships, Chekrovolu Swuro had the best outing and narrowly missed out on a medal by losing by one point in the bronze medal match.
Mangal Singh who was in second place after the ranking round, also finished with an individual bronze.
In the Olympic qualifiers, which was the main interest for our boys there (women already have a berth), we started out the Olympic round (single elimination match play) with Mangal Singh in first place, Jayant Talukdar in fourth and Rahul in fifth.
Rahul and Jayant met each other in the quarter finals with Rahul winning which made up for Mangal vs. Rahul in one semi and a Malaysian vs. Philipino in the other. With the to three qualifying India was thereby assured one berth for Beijing.
Mangal ended up the winner, thereby securing a berth for the country. Rahul had some bad luck and ended up losing in the bronze medal match by one point in a shoot off. That really put a bit of a damper to an otherwise very successful tournament.
Am also proud of both my Mittal Champions Trust kids (mangal and Chekrovolu) who have really matured into world class archers over the last couple of years.
In my next post i would really like to talk about the ugly side of archery in india due to which we failed to qualify as a team at the world championships.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like that was a good outing. Good to hear that your athletes are making some serious progress at the international level. Cheers, Ravi.