We have no excuse to offer: Limba Ram

Archery coaches Limba Ram and Ravi Shankar on Sunday said that they have no excuse to offer for their team not performing to the expectations in the Olympics.

‘There are no excuses’ they said in an interaction in the Games village before team’s departure for India.

‘We trained hard, we were given all facilities by the Archery Association of India, SAI and Government. We are also disappointed with the results,’ they said.

They agreed that hype around the team had raised the expectations but that was natural. The archers were doing well before the Olympics. ‘Deepika Kumari was ranked World Number 1 by the International federation and not by us. Our boys team came here ranked number two’, they said.

Limba said he cannot explain the sudden slump in the form of the archers. “To be honest, we came here with the hope of winning at least one medal,” he said.
Ravi Shankar was also candid in his views “look I have some observations to make but please do not construe them as excuses. Olympics are a totally different ball game. Our archers have participated in several World Championships and Cups and won few of them. But the overall aura of the Olympics is awesome and that too had a big impact. Only two of our archers Tarundeep and Bombayla Devi had previous experience of Olympic Games.”

“Several top notch archers of different countries who had performed very well in other championships also failed here,” he added.

He admitted that there were too many expectations and too much pressure on Deepika Kumari and she caved under that. ‘Everybody was saying that this girl was the sure medal winner and that put lot of pressure on the teenager and she could not cope up with that,’ he said.

“It looks that presence of huge crowd and the glitz surrounding the venue made Deepika nervous and that showed in her results,” he added.

Ravi Shankar said that being billed as one of the top men’s team helped us ‘getting a good draw but then one must understand that here the competition was on knockout format and there was no second chance to come back.

He admitted that his archers could not adjust to the cross wind conditions. “We tried hard, practices in those conditions but still could not make anything out of it and also luck also deserted our archers at crucial stages”, he said.

He said “the windy conditions affected all the teams. See the scores of all the teams and you will notice the inconsistency”.

“Unfortunately our archers fell ill a day after they landed here. It took couple of days for them to recover and that also had some impact on their physical training,” he added.

Ravi Shankar said still the archers gave their hundred percent. “It is another thing that they failed to reproduce the form that had raised such hopes but this is part of sports and we will have to accept it.”