Indian shooter Manu Bhaker was looking forward to taking part in her first ever Olympics but the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic forced the organisers to postpone the event and she is now in lockdown along with the rest of the country. Bhaker, who had won an Olympics quota in women’s 10m Air Pistol last year, talked about her current routine in a recent interview and said how monkeys are hampering her practice.
“I am trying to practice daily because I have a range inside the house itself and I try to take complete of the facility. But there are some issues some days. Like I have a manual machine and it breaks every other day. Also, there are a lot of monkeys here and because the range is open from the backside, they also hamper my practice, “ she told India Today.
The Tokyo Olympics were postponed by a year due to the crisis and all other events have also been cancelled. Bhaker said that he misses the tournaments but added that looking after her mental health is extremely important at this moment.
“This time I think there would have been a test event in Japan for the Tokyo Olympics. So this would have been a trial period for us to get through the range and the lighting there. And after that some matches I guess, the Munich World Cup and the Delhi ISSF shooting World Cup, “
“I was expecting some tournaments to be affected by suddenly everything has been impacted by the pandemic, everything is getting canceled. I feel both positive and disappointed at the same time. We were at the peak of our performance recently and would have been nice to compete at the Olympics right now. But then, health is more important than anything. But when we practice with the team, there is always that competitive spirit, because we can see people doing better than us. So that’s lacking.”
{{/usCountry}}“I was expecting some tournaments to be affected by suddenly everything has been impacted by the pandemic, everything is getting canceled. I feel both positive and disappointed at the same time. We were at the peak of our performance recently and would have been nice to compete at the Olympics right now. But then, health is more important than anything. But when we practice with the team, there is always that competitive spirit, because we can see people doing better than us. So that’s lacking.”
{{/usCountry}}