The television commentator's sympathetic words trailed Deepika Kumari, sporting a rueful, dimpled smile, as she made her way towards coach Purnima Mahato. "This is a hard luck story again for Deepika Kumari." A short while later the rights holder clip had titled this 'Deepika's Valiant Effort Falls Short.'
This was the second successive Olympic quarter-final for India's most celebrated woman archer. Until Friday evening, Olympic quarters was as far as any Indian archer had ever gone. That day, Ankita Bhakat and Dheeraj Bommadevara made it to the mixed team semi-final and were competing for a medal.
They were Olympic debutants; was this the new dawn that Indian archery had been waiting for?
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Not really. Never mind rosy dawns, what Indian archery needs is a hard reboot. Not just of player-personnel or coaching staff but of a culture - or rather an institutional sickness - that has kept archery jogging at the same spot through many Olympic cycles. This for a discipline that has been on the government's 'priority sports' list for the last 15 years.
A good time to mention another 'priority sport', shooting. India's shooters are the toast of the nation while archers get, at best, a sympathetic second thought. But this is not recency bias - if we view archery and shooting, an even more capital-intensive precision sport, through the Olympic prism, the medals contrast is stark: archery zero, shooting seven.
India's recurve archers (compound archery, at which India has been hugely successful of late, is not an Olympic sport) will stoutly defend their record by citing World Cups, World Championship victories and world records. But at an Olympic Games they routinely come up empty.
This comparison annoys archery people who point to Indian shooting's much older roots, and success at other levels. India's first Asian Games shooting medal came in Jakarta 1962 and India has been sending shooters to the Olympics from Helsinki 1952.
India archery made its Asiad debut in Delhi 1982 but made its way to public notice only after 1986 and the creation of the Special Area Games Scheme. It led to the emergence of Limba Ram, part of India's first team of recurve archers to the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Its first Asiad medal came in 2006.
Archery loyalists also point out is that most of shooting (other than shot gun) takes place in indoor, sterile environments rather than the outdoor variables of the archery arena. But medal tallies, external or internal, tell their own stories.
In the last 18 years, Indian recurve archers have won only six Asian Games medals: two silver, four bronze. The last individual recurve Asian Games medal was Tarundeep Rai's 2010 silver. In Hangzhou 2023, the men's and women's team won silver and bronze respectively.
Yes, South Korea dominate this sport and grab most gold medals at the Olympics and Asian Games, but there's been more than two silvers and six bronzes for the taking over nearly two decades. In the last 15 years which marked a progressive surge across most individual sport, Indian archery has only paddled in a pool of stagnation.
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When it comes to the Olympics, archery has only operated with a blunt edge. More than one person in the Indian archery system have told this writer that archery's culture is flawed, revolving mostly around the wishes of senior archers and a federation that seems unable to push for change and overturn this status quo.
Viren Rasquinha, former India hockey captain and CEO of Olympic Gold Quest - which mentors and manages top-level athletes - has watched shooting and archery from close for more than ten years. Last week, he put out a searing social media post highlighting the difference in Olympic success between archery and other 'priority sports'.
The Govt/SAI has 8 High Priority Disciplines in Sport and funds/supports all these 8 sports very well:
1. Archery
2. Athletics
3. Badminton
4. Boxing
5. Hockey
6. Shooting
7. Weightlifting
8. WrestlingOnly Archery has yet to win an Olympic medal. Food for thought.
- Viren Rasquinha (@virenrasquinha) August 2, 2024
In a chat with ESPN, he expanded on this thought. "In sports you have to create an environment of healthy competition, juniors have to come up on merit... (in archery) There is no environment of excellence."
The bar, he says, has to be set high. "If you want to participate, like in my time (2000s) when it was chalo jaao participate karo, be happy with coming close, then you can do what you want. But if you are serious about winning medals, then you have to be cutting-edge in preparation and support staff."
Archery insiders echo his words, speaking of a lack of intensity and seriousness with regard to training, trainers or emerging talent. The Archery Association of India (AAI) is happy to let senior archers take their decisions on their behalf about who coaches the team and what training standards are maintained.
"The seniors choose the coaches, who are not actually coaches but just people who carry water and kit for them" says one archery insider. "The seniors don't want to change, they feel they have achieved World Cups through their own efforts and there is a lot of resistance in the camps."
When foreign coaches are brought in, says another, "the seniors gang up against coaches who will push them and demand more." Should the coach try and make technical corrections working with the juniors, the seniors then complain that their technique is being spoiled and their scores going down. "They make it difficult", the source said, "for either new technical coaches to come in or for new coaches to be developed." The juniors then follow the same culture, which permeates down through the camps.
This seems borne out by events during and after the Hangzhou 2023 Asian Games and the Paris2024 Olympics. After the Indians, coached by South Korean Baek Woong Ki (who had worked with the London 2012 Olympic champions), returned from Hangzhou with their first Asian Games recurve medals in ten years, stories began to emerge about how the senior archers were unhappy with Baek, whose job was in danger.
Baek stayed and in April 2024, the Indians won three medals at the Shanghai Archery World Cup Stage 1 event. The men's team defeated giants Korea to win gold, Deepika Kumari won silver in the women's individual event, and Bommadevara and Bhajan Kaur won bronze in the mixed team. In the Stage 3 World Cup in Antalya, Turkey, India won two medals - Dheeraj (men's individual bronze) and once again Dheeraj-Bhajan's mixed team bronze.
Baek travelled to Compiegne, France for a pre-Games camp but a week before the Olympics, he found himself left out of the AAI-approved Games squad and resigned in protest. The squad's Paris coaches were Purnima Mahato and Sonam Tshering Bhutia from the Army Sports Institute.
"The seniors choose the coaches, who are not actually coaches but just people who carry water and kit for them."
This raised ripples in the sports community and in the media. In response, Gunjan Abrol, assistant secretary of the AAI, told New Indian Express: "Our women's team... are more comfortable with Purnima. With regard to the men's team, all three members are from Army. Sonam Tshering Bhutia is there as a coach with them. Sometimes they need direction during the event and language could be the barricade at that time, so (he is there with the team)." Mahato is on her fourth Olympics. The results speak for themselves.
As the first archery insider quoted above put it, "If the federation was strong, they would say nothing doing, the coach will be there till the Olympics...if the federation won't empower the coach who will?"
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Shooting is not immune to the constant pulls and tugs between federation, shooter and team or personal coaches. But the end goal is excellence - and a chance to shine on the big stage. The competition is intense - every senior shooter's door is being hammered down by a junior - and, consequently, the quality is high.
The National Rifle Association of India's junior programme had thrown up a clutch of young contenders who move smoothly from age-group events into the seniors, the team personnel in every big mega Games open to change. For example, only four Indian shooters out of 21 in Paris were at their second Olympics; the rest were debutants. Similarly, the 2023 Asian Games Indian shooting team had only three shooters (out of 31) who'd competed in Jakarta 2018. Every tournament becomes an accounting of the shooter's training sessions and the quality of their coach.
After two successive Olympic debacles, when shooters returned without medals, the NRAI made radical changes to its selection procedure. The trials process for Paris spots, held over four stages, was particularly brutal: Rudrankksh Patil, Akhil Sheoran and Tilottama Sen, who'd won Olympic shooting quotas at international events, didn't make the cut for the Games itself. Double medallist Manu Bhaker was not part of Asian Games or World Championships teams for her 10m pistol events but had a strong performance in the trials to book her ticket to Paris.
Rasquinha explained how the trials process helped. "Shooting has this depth, this competition in that no one can take their spot for granted... the trials simulated the pressure that someone like Manu faced at the Olympics." That was borne out by how Bhaker and Swapnil Kusale won their medals - one had to deal with the trauma of Tokyo, the other was inexperienced at this level.
"Whatever you say, the shooting federation has been good," Rasquinha added. "It has offered a good level of preparation, organisation and support. If their planning was, say, 8 out of 10, I would give archery 4 or 5 out of 10."
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The lack of Olympic shooting medals in Rio and Tokyo led to internal inquiries. Archery has gone through Olympic cycles with little reworking of processes or personnel.
For a team with knock-out yips, there was no psychologist in Paris; instead, there was physiotherapist Arvind Yadav. He received an official credential despite facing allegations of "inappropriate approach" to an under-18 archer of another team during the world youth championships. The AAI's international complaints committee dismissed the allegation as a 'simple hi-hello.'
"The physio is good friends with the federation officials. Good friends go to these Olympics, not people with merit or qualifications," says another individual in the system. "The professionalism of the federation leaves much to be desired."
In Paris, Bommadevara more than anyone else showed up that he was made for the Big 2 'O's: The Olympics and the Occasion. Which is usually where Indian archery goes into hiding. The mixed team semi-final qualification was the exception more than a norm. "Every Olympics we shoot great in qualification - we were in men's and women's team top four, first time ever. Why? No pressure," says the insider. "The moment the pressure of elimination comes, they choke. Why? Because this pressure is never there in training, there is no intensity, there is no seriousness. If you don't do it in training, you cannot do it in the match. Why do they do well in world championships? Because no one is watching - maybe 11 crows and two buffaloes. There is no pressure, no scrutiny. In the Olympics, everyone is watching."
Says the second source, "If I was federation president, I would have created a huge racket and demanded answers both the quality of the national camps, the quality of the coaches in those camps, the quality of my support staff... If you are losing out because of your technique, not maturing, not improving then you've got to go."
All compelling arguments, but the AAI is not convinced. Asked about the inability to get Baek to join the team in Paris, AAI secretary Virendra Sachdeva told ESPN: "You're the one saying that we need the foreign coach." Referring to the athletes as bachche (children) he said, "We will talk to the bachche, we go according to what their preference is... we don't rule out their feelings."
"Good friends go to these Olympics, not people with merit or qualifications."
Asked whether this was not a weakness on the part of the AAI, Sachdeva said, "I don't know what is your definition of weak or strong, but we are liberal and we give a chance and listen to each of the bachchas." When pointed out that this approach had not led to Olympic medals, he talked about the wins in the world cups, World Championship and Asian Championships and said had any of the Indian archers won a medal in Paris, "none of this talk would be happening."
Whether this approach itself was not the reason for archery's shortcomings over the last two decades, Acharya said, "our players and our coaches are trying 100 percent, no one is not trying to win a medal. One thing has to click, unfortunately it is not, but there is no shortage in our efforts."
All that effort in Indian archery, however, has only run on empty.