Harpal Singh Bedi / New Delhi
Beijing Olympics gold medallist Abhinav Bindra has cautioned the sportspersons and coaches preparing for the 2024 Games saying “the road to Paris will be difficult given the shorter Olympic cycle”
The ace shooter praised the country’s performance at the Tokyo Games, “It was a historic performance with the best-ever seven medals. There were moments of great triumph and heartbreaks, but that is what sport is all about”
“We have good momentum now going forward. I see the next Olympics cycle will be tricky, primarily because of the shorter cycle. Normally athletes get a year post-Olympics that allows them to rest and recover, but this time around they need to get back pretty quickly,” Abhinav said at a webinar organised by ELMS Sports Foundation.
As the Tokyo Games were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic by a year and the Olympics cycle has been reduced to three years, from the usual four, going into the 2024 Paris Games. The athletes will now have fewer qualification events and quotas.
In Tokyo, Javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra bagged the country its only second Olympics gold. The champion shooter was of the view that bringing in scientific methods and creating a high-performance environment at the grassroots level will be critical going forward.
“We talk about top leaderships but I think we need to get more quality in the second-level of leadership. We need to empower these people with knowledge of how to set a high-performance environment.”
” Incorporating science, technology, engineering, analytics, and medicine to athletes’ training and development not just at the elite level but basing it right at the grassroots level is important,” he addedThe 38-year-old however was of the view that the country’s college-level sporting system is not developed effectively enough and needs to be played in a much more meaningful way going forward as we lose a lot of talent in the transition from junior to elite level.