Tokyo Paralympics 2020: After acing three shoot-offs for bronze medal, annual progress review awaits PhD student Harvinder Singh

When Harvinder Singh returns to India after winning the country’s first-ever medal in archery at a Paralympics , he will have an equally stern test awaiting him as competing in Tokyo. The PhD (in Economics) student will have to present his annual progress review report at Patiala’s Punjabi University, which could be a herculean task given the countless felicitation events and media interviews that await him. “The last date for presenting my annual (progress review report) is a week from today. So now I have to go back home and prepare for that in order to present it before a committee,” said Harvinder, who believes that the analytical and critical thinking he needs for getting a PhD degree also make him a better archer. On Friday, Harvinder thrice found himself in a shoot-off, those winner-takes-all, one-shot game deciders which bring either instant victory or heartbreak. In the first match, he shot a 10 in the shoot-off to edge Italy’s Stefano Travisani. Nearly eight hours later, he found himself facing another shoot-off, this time against Bato Tsydendorzhiev. While he shot only an eight, his opponent’s seven sent him through to the quarters. There he beat Germany’s Maik Szarszewski in a straightforward encounter. But a loss against USA’s Kevin Mather in the semi-finals meant he had to fight South Korea’s Kim Min Su to salvage a bronze medal. For the third time on the evening — this time with the added pressure of a medal agonisingly within grasp — he found himself in a shoot-off. And for the third time, he edged his opponent. “I always try and train for shoot-off situations,” he said pointing out that the pressure that comes with shoot-offs was not new to him. At the Para Asian Games in 2018, where he won a gold medal, he had won a match after two shoot-offs. “I have been at the archery ranges for nearly 12 or 13 hours today. I reached here at 8 am, and it was 9 pm by the time my medal was won. So when you have gone through all of that, it’s all the more satisfying to have a medal to show for the effort,” said the archer, who suffered an adverse effect from an injection as an 18-month-old child which left him with limited movement in his legs. At Tokyo’s Yumenoshima Archery Ranges, it wasn’t just time that was testing Harvinder. During his matches, the weather also played tricks. It was raining on some occasions, and windy at other times. “Particularly in the semi-final against Mather, it was raining initially. When this happens, your arrows tend to hit lower on the target. Then it stopped but the wind was wreaking havoc with my shots. Arrows were starting to hit the target higher. In that match, I couldn’t judge the wind accurately and that cost me the match,” he said from Tokyo in a virtual press conference organised by Eurosport, the Indian broadcast partners for the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. “When you are about to release the arrow, there are just so many thoughts flitting through your mind. Controlling your mind is the biggest task for an archer at that stage,” he said. In a bid to keep distractions at bay, Harvinder also actively stayed away from social media for the past few days, and kept his mobile switched off all through Friday. “You always get reminded that you are expected to win a medal if you use your phone before competitions of such magnitude. That’s why I chose to stay away from it,” he said. Training in farm   While Harvinder credits his analytical thinking for bringing home the bronze medal, it was also his ingenuity that played a part.

When the coronavirus pandemic forced the world to impose strict lockdowns, bringing all sort of high-performance training to a standstill, Harvinder actually set up a makeshift archery range at his family’s farm in Haryana’s Kaithal. “When lockdown happened, I had ordered targets to train at home. Initially, since it’s a big house, I used to train indoors. But once I heard that the Olympics and Paralympics were postponed by a year, we set up a makeshift range in my father’s farmland. The wheat in the fields had already been harvested, so there was a lot of empty space. My father and brother cleared out a vast expanse of the field with a tractor, and I was off to train for the Games,” he said. Once the restrictions were eased after the first wave in India subsided, there was a short national camp. But soon India was hit by a second wave. Once again, Harvinder sought comfort in the makeshift archery range set up at his family’s farm. “This medal is a result of all that work,” he said.