India’s first individual Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra on Thursday said the road to the 2024 Paris Games will be difficult and ‘tricky’ given the shorter three-year cycle. Bindra feels the lack of a year could hamper an athlete’s preparation for the world’s biggest sporting extravaganza as they will get lesser time to recuperate from the previous Games. The shooting ace also lauded the country’s performance at the recently-concluded Tokyo Olympics. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics was closed on August 8 this year after having been postponed from last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This meant the next Olympic Games in Paris which will be held in 2024 are just three years away as opposed to the usual four-year cycle.
“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 a good momentum now going forward,” Bindra spoke during a webinar hosted by ELMS Sports Foundation.
He added, “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.”
Indians returned from the Tokyo Games with seven medals – 1 Gold, 2 Silver, and 4 Bronze, their best ever haul at a single edition of the Olympics. This included gold in athletics from Neeraj Chopra (men’s javelin), making him only India’s second individual gold medallist at the Olympics after Bindra.
The athletes will now be left with a challenge of having less qualification events and quotas.
The celebrated shooter believes 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 elite level but basing it right at the grassroots level is important,” the 2008 Beijing Olympic champion said.
The 38-year-old also felt 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 it loses a lot of talent in the transition from junior to elite level.
(With PTI Inputs)