Saturday 18 August 2012

London Olympics 2012 - India's Performance Analysis

The London Olympics 2012 are over and the Indian contingent has returned home. With a final tally of 2 Silver and 4 Bronze, the team stood 55th in the final medals tally. This is the most number of medals won by India in any one Olympic games. Also, India sent the largest contingent this time around - 83 athletes competing in 13 disciplines.This also means that more Athletes qualified this time around.

I would like to analyze India's overall performance in this Part of the Analysis Series.

Medal Winners
India increased the medals tally from 3  to 6 in these games - in Beijing India had 1 Gold and 2 Bronze medals.

At London, the medals came in Wrestling, Badminton, Shooting and Boxing.

The Medals winners were:
Silver
SUSHIL KUMAR - Wrestling
VIJAY KUMAR - Shooting
Bronze
GAGAN NARANG - Shooting
MC MARY KOM - Boxing
SAINA NEHWAL - Badminton
YOGESHWAR DUTT - Wrestling

Kudos to these Athletes and many congratulations to them. It was a great moment to see the Indian tricolor being hoisted at the games medal ceremonies - thanks to these Athletes. It gave a feeling of - Yes, we too can win at the world stage !! 



The sure-shots who failed
There were some more athletes that were being touted as sure-shot medal winners. But they failed to deliver. The greatest disappointment was from Deepika Kumari and Ronjan Sodhi. They both were World No.1 in their sports - Archery and Shooting respectively. One would have thought that would reach the finals and would end up on the podium atleast.

Deepika Kumari lost in the 1st round itself and could not advance any further. After the loss, she said that I did not know what happened and before I could think it was all over. People also attributed her loss to the changing wind direction - which is a well known fact - at Lords where the event was held. If that was the case indeed, a World No.1 is expected to adjust and take it in her stride. If it was a case of nerves, then at that stage and a World No.1 is expected to be mentally tough. In the days to come , her coaches would figure out what exactly are the shortcomings and I hope they and Deepika would work to cover these and retain her position.
(On a funny side, there were reports that the coach Limba Ram thought that it was Black Magic which did India in at these games. A lot was expected from the Archery contingent but none could reach the podium, so the frustation of coach is obvious, but Black Magic.. guess he was pushing his luck a bit far :-) . 

While on the Archery contingent, some of the guys shot a 6 !! I would say that a 6 at this stage is simply uncalled for at this level.).

Ronjan Sodhi was also expected to return a medal winner. He, however, lost and failed to qualify for the finals. While I thought he was a cool customer and was an underdog with less limelight on him as Abhinav Bindra was giving him the cover there and he was a World No. 1 also. However,  he missed a few hits and was always catching up and did not make the cut for the finals. One would expect a World No.1 to reach the finals atleast.

From the two instances above, Is it to do with mental toughness? What do you think?


4 comments:

Play angry Birds said...

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Don Grierson said...

Nice stuff ...Really informative ..

RN said...

Thanks Don Grierson and others for finding it useful.. please follow if you want. Thanks !