Asian Games 2018 | Junior coaches sent to Jakarta instead of Physios for Indian shooters

08/21/2018

Surprisingly, the Indian rifle and pistol shooters have gone to Indonesia for Asian games without any official physiotherapist. The team of 14 small-bore shooters is relying on Olympic gold quest's (OGC) - an NGO founded by Prakash Padukone, physios to help them after their respective events.

Such a situation has occurred after the NRAI -National Rifle Association for India - preferred to take two junior team coaches along instead of physios. The NRAI has taken junior pistol coach Jaspal Rana and junior rifle coach Suma Shirur to Asiad despite having in the contingent senior rifle and pistol coaches Pavel Smirnov and Oleg Mikhailov.

Rana has gone to Palembang as Manu Bhaker's coach and Suma has gone as Elavenil V’s coach. Both Manu and Elavenil are junior shooters who are shooting in the senior events. Under normal circumstances when a junior shooter participates in senior events, he trains under the senior coach. But NRAI has made an exception for Manu and Elavenil at the cost of sending physios. Since the OGQ physios don't have accreditations, and because of that they can treat players only at the games village while visiting as guests. During matches, the OGQ physios occupy the spectators arena and can't treat shooters due to no accessibility. If a shooter needs help during an event, the NRAI cannot do anything about it.

When asked about the need to send Rana and Suma with the team, NRAI president Raminder Singh admitted that ideally, all the shooters should have trained under senior coaches but this time they had time constraints.

"Our shooters had a small window for the transition from junior to senior competitions this time. I had asked junior coaches to let go of their students once they enter the senior squad. But ahead of the Asiad, we didn't have enough time for that. We get limited accreditations and we could not accommodate the physios since we were taking the extra coaches. If I had the luxury of taking more people, I would've taken 2-3 physios. We requested the OGQ’s physios to help our shooters. We have a physio with the shotgun team and I understand that the requirements of pistol and rifle shooters are different,” Raminder said.