JOIN USIndia’s shotgun shooter Ronjan Sodhi is confidence personified as he enters the Olympic year with a crystal clear game plan — experiment a few things and save himself from burnout by putting a cap on the number of events he participates.
The Punjab lad will be the country’s big hope at the London Olympics and his confidence is backed by some stunning performances in the last few years. He excelled in different conditions consistently whether it was winning gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games in 2010 or the defence of his world title in 2011 in Abu Dhabi.
Now that his current training regimen and technique has given him outstanding results, he won’t tinker with that but would try a few things before the Olympics.
And the first opportunity for the experimentation is Asian Championship in Doha, starting next week. “This is the time I can experiment. I don’t want to experiment two months before the Olympics. There are not many things but a little adjustment with gun-setting and technique,” Sodhi told PTI before leaving for Doha.
“I lost weight over the last few months. I am working on fitness and with that your gun settings change. I don’t want to experiment many things. Let’s see how it goes,” he said. The Asian championship is significant for those Indian shooters, who have not yet qualified for the Olympics as it will be their last chance to do so.
But Sodhi, who has already qualified, is also giving a lot of importance to the event, in which he will be competing for the second time — the last time being in 2007 when he failed to qualify for Beijing Olympics.
“Since it is the first tournament of the year, I want to start on a strong note. And it will be challenging since extreme windy conditions would be there,” Sodhi said.