Paris Olympics 2024: Lakshya, Lovlina advance in good day for India
Olympic debutants Lakshya Sen and Swapnil Kusale shine in Paris. Lakshya advances after beating world No. 4, while Kusale sets new record in shooting.
Shuttler Lakshya Sen and shooter Swapnil Kusale were up against it. The former had a mountain of a group stage draw to get past, the latter had a quality field and a high-scoring qualification round to manoeuvre.
Bringing their best out on the day, both Olympic debutants got where they wanted to be at the 2024 Paris Games on Wednesday. Lakshya marched into the knockouts after stunning world No. 4 and reigning All England champion Jonatan Christie 21-18, 21-12 and topping a group that was the most stacked up in the men’s singles badminton event.
Kusale finished seventh in a 50m men’s rifle 3 positions qualification that set a new Olympic record of 594 and in which the Indian scored 590. Tied with three other men on that score and advancing on account of more inner 10s (38), the Maharashtra shooter will have a crack at a 50m rifle 3 positions medal — an event no Indian shooter has ever medalled in — among eight men in the final on Thursday in the shooting ranges of Chateauroux.
Lakshya wriggled his way out of challenges from the onset. He won his first Olympics match against Kevin Cordon, only for that result to be null and void after Cordon had pulled out of tournament. With no room for error in his next two group matches, the Indian ensured there were none, defeating Belgian Julien Carraggi and Christie — against whom he came in with a 1-4 win-loss record — with aplomb.
Wading through a thorny draw while blazing past a player he hadn’t beaten in four attempts and in four years, Lakshya is exactly in the kind of run that can make him a force to reckon with in the knockouts starting with the Round of 16.
“The way the match went today, it will give me a lot of confidence going forward,” Lakshya said, wiping away sweat off his forehead. “Now is the time to look back, take a few good things from these matches and also what I can improve upon. And come back fresh and do my best again in the Round of 16.”
For the soft-spoken Kusale, who took to shooting at the state-run Krida Prabodhini in Pune, making the final is a significant step in a career that has so far been headlined by falling short due to one faltering shot.
In two big finals over the last few years, Kusale had to contend with fourth-place finishes. At the Hangzhou Asian Games last year, Kusale had a historic first Asian Games 50m 3P gold for India in sight before a low 7.6 took him down. Two years before that in the Cairo World Championships final from where he won the Paris Olympics quota, he was second until the final shot, where an 8.2 undid all the work.
An admirer of cricketer MS Dhoni, Kusale will hope to carry the confidence of his qualification score into the final. The 28-year-old shot 198 in kneeling, 197 in prone and 195 in standing to be among the top eight in a list headed by Liu Yukun, the Chinese shooter who had equalled the world record score of 597 in June this year and notched up a qualification Olympic record score on Wednesday.
Boxer Lovlina Borgohain, the Tokyo Olympics bronze medallist, kicked off her campaign in Paris with a unanimous 5-0 win against Norway’s Sunniva Hofstad to enter the 75kg quarter-finals.
Later in the day, Manika Batra, who became the first Indian table tennis player ever to enter the Round of 16 in singles, went down 4-1 to Japan’s world No.13 and 8th seed Miu Hirano.