No looking back for Rai

Tarundeep Rai is the reason Mangal Singh Champia is missing from the Indian team for the Commonwealth Games.

Tarundeep Rai is the reason Mangal Singh Champia is missing from the Indian team for the Commonwealth Games. He may be forgiven for boasting about it,after what happened to him two years back,but Rai is more circumspect.

A veteran of Indian archery,Rai was there on the national scene long before the Talukdars and Champias made their mark. But in the run up to the 2008 Olympics,Rais form dipped. He failed to qualify for Beijing but the most severe censure came from the Army,which withdrew him from the national ranking tournament in August 2007,months after he was feted along with Dola Banerjee for his Asian Championships heroics in Delhi.

The last two years have been difficult,with Rai going from a regular to nobody in double quick time. At that time,Champia was the next big thing in archery and Rai was struggling to claw his way back into the fringes of the Indian team. More agony was in store for the Sikkimese archer,with his much-worked shoulder caving in.

Many thought my career was over. I cant even describe what I was going through at that time, Rai said. But now I am content,I have proven the cynics wrong. My comeback just didnt happen like that. I had to work every bit hard,if not harder,than many of my team mates.

The comeback started in November last year at Dhaka,where he was part of Indias B team at the Asian Grand Prix. He beat his illustrious team mates,including Jayanta Talukdar,in the semi-finals on his way to the gold. In February this year,Rai beat them once again to an individual gold at the South Asian Federation SAF Games. These wins ensured my confidence was back, says the army subedar,who also struck gold at archerys test event at the Yamuna Sports Complex.

He hasnt looked back since and was part of the Indian mens recurve team that won gold at the Shanghai World Cup in August. The hunger is back too. Of the two available golds in recurve we should get one. Two is possible too.

Having been through the grind,Rai is not worried about the Commonwealth Games. Unlike him,however,many of his team mates are worried about the likely attention and scrutiny as archery returns to the CWG stable after its 1982 debut in Brisbane. Pressure is immense. We cant fail,not in front of home crowd. Weve have been shooting without this kind of attention most of our careers. This would a very different experience, said a senior archer.