Indians win both men's and women's team events in ongoing Asian Games on Thursday

HANGZHOU:  A world record holder. World champions. Now, Asian Games champions. India's compound archers have been hitting 10s for months now. Their purple patch is such that they will find it harder to miss than to hit the inner 10. 2023 could well go down as the year when the country's super compound archers won the entire lot. However, it wasn't that long ago when India didn't have much of an idea about the format. To the officials, a compound may well have been chemistry and not part of archery. Enter India's now high-performance director, Sanjeeva Singh. The year's 2004 and post a trip to the Worlds in New York, he has come back with a single compound bow. "People laughed at me," he said. "They said… ‘India has never won recurve, why should we get this?' "But I knew this was one game that was ideally suited to the Indian archers because we are very low in physique and our physiques are not very strong. So, this game helped all of our junior archers who are shorter in height and who are not big to adopt this game." Even if he was mocked, he persevered because he knew his theory was sound. It also sort of helped that Sanjeeva knew what he was doing. The Olympian from 1988 won the nationals in 2005. The laughter stopped and people started taking him seriously. Minor Asian medals immediately followed as baby steps towards world domination began earnestly. "We have achieved the best that anyone can achieve.”

 Jyothi Surekha Vennam, Aditi Gopichand and Parneet Kaur celebrate after clinching the compound women's team event

After wiping the floor in the mixed team event, they once again owned the stage at the Fuyang Yinhu Sports Centre on Thursday. Two gold medals in the men's and women's team events followed, with the former taking down South Korea, who sort of have a patent on the sport. That India kind of went into that match-up as the favourites tells you everything you need to know about the kind of growth story compound archery is on (women beat Chinese Taipei 230-229 while men beat South Korea 235-230). "We are very happy because this is the first time that we have won a gold medal in the Asian Games in the compound women's category," Jyothi Surekha Vennam said. "There was wind which made the final challenging. We had to calm ourselves and focus on our shooting. We train to be our best even in the worst conditions, irrespective of what the opponents shoot." On Saturday, they have the chance to keep adding more gold from compound archery. In 2004, one man, armed with one compound bow, made this revolution possible. 19 years later, India is in the middle of a revolution. And it could have a significant impact — there is talk that compound archery will be included in the Los Angeles Olympics programme in 2028.