prasen9 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 16, 2023 9:01 am
By the world rankings, our top 4 in recurve are Bommadevara, Talukdar, Salunkhe, Chauhan. So, Talukdar and Salunkhe did not make it. Are the rankings accurate predictors of success or at least as good as anything else and slightly better? One off trials are worse than good rankings.
In women's recurve, the top-4 are: Bhajan, Ridhi, Bhakat, Bari. Again Bhajan and Bhakat made it. The other two did not.
In men's compound, our top-4 are: Abhisekh, Jawkar, Priyansh, Chauhan. Again, two out of these in Jawkar and Chauhan made it.
Women's compound top 4: Pragati, Parneet, Avneet, Vennam. You got it. Avneet and Vennam made it.
Taken another way, the rankings could not predict exactly what team would be chosen.
Target sports like Archery or Shooting is one area where, i feel, selection should based on testing if athlete "Chokes" in crunch situations and this can only work by replicating such "Crunch" scenarios by going to the other extremes in selection criteria like deciding the selection of the athletes for Asian Games or Olympics with just scores from 1 trial and that too held right at the last moment before submitting the entries to the games.
In shooting for example all these so called "consistently" performing shooters have been consistent only because they know there are 5-6 ISSF world cups every year and if they miss in one, they have the next chance to win coming very soon. Its not so with Olympics or Asian games which come only ONCE in 4 years and they choke in those "Consistently".
So for shooting i would put selection criteria something on the lines " In Air rifle qualify the athletes reaching 630 or above in 6 rounds and conduct the final between them. In 10m Air pistol, it can be like 580 or above for qualification followed by final". Just put the athletes on edge in pressure cooker situation like that and just go with those selection no matter what the name and fame of athlete is. If no one reaches qualification scores, conduct the trails again next day until 2 or more athletes clear the qualification to compete in final. I think that would fetch better results.
Is there any evidence for this hypothesis? Is this better than random? That is, is someone who made it in one trial really someone who can handle pressure or is it that they just got lucky because every dog has his day? Are there cups such as the year end World Championship, etc. that are also high stakes. In the sense, does it really matter that one has several of these every year? A World Championship is a big deal and surely must be immense pressure when you are shooting in the final. Maybe for winners in such high-stakes tournaments, we should have direct quotas?
In essence, we are arguing how we can choose people who can stand pressure. Is reducing the sample size going to help with that or just simply turn up someone relatively randomly among the good ones every time you do it?
I think we can safely say that once a choker, always a choker. So we should try to weed out the chokers like Deepika Kumari and Manu Bhaker by comparing their results in the "big" tournaments against run-of-the-mill kinds (I only consider Olympics and Asian Games as the big events for non-popular events like archery and shooting). For example, if they are known to consistently shoot 590 in WCs but only shot avg of 585 in Olympics/Asians, that should count as a negative score of -5 ( it could go positive too, but that would be rare) when comparing the trial scores for the next big event. For archery, the qualification scores are not important, so we should compare the final standing in big events vs WCs.
Again is this true? Are there players who went multiple times to say the Olympics or the Asian Games? Among these players, is it true that once a choker alwayws a choker? That is, players who did badly the first time never won? We need to objectively look at records to see if there are such patterns. If so, we should utilize them.
It is quite likely that this is true for bad archers. Some are just bad and consistently bad across multiple events. But, are there people who did badly in one event and then made it later?
I remember in shooting Bindra was one who failed once but then figured it out.
No evidence yet to support my assumption which is only based on partial data available so far which makes me feel there should not be that big of gap in medals between China and India looking at the performance of India and China in the run up to Olympics.
To answer your question we need to look at what Chinese Federation for shooting has done to top the medal tally in 4 of the 6 last Olympics and the remaining two editions they were in top 3 or 4. I feel they must be doing something fundamentally different than us. I couldn't even lookup their association homepage (similar to our https://www.thenrai.in/). I guess even if we find their site, it may still list down the selection criteria in "Mandarin" script. Even if we translate the rules, we may still not understand which of their athletes performed how in the run up as all data will again be in a script we can't immediately make sense. If anyone can find their federation page, please do help me with that, i will try to put in more effort into translating using tools available.
I think we need to segregate archery and shooting here. In shooting we have consistently won medals in world cups, world championships and Asiad too. In archery, we have won medals at world cups mainly when stronger nations like Korea, China are not there ,there were only odd occasions when we won medals in archery when full competition was there. We hardly have any medals in Asian games too. In shooting, major disappointment was no medal in last 2 olympics but before that we have won medals at olympics too.
So, shooting we have been at a much higher level than archery. I do not think we have lost medals in archery due to selection issues. If one says Deepika Kumari is a choker, she was still dominating all the trials till this year. So, how can we say that she should be removed from the team.
So, major discussion here I think is about shooting. There, I do not see how just 1 selection trial can be a criteria in a random sport like shooting. It is impossible to replicate olympics level mental pressure at any other event. So, it is very difficult to set a perfect criteria which will win us medals.
Exactly. Fully agree with this. In archery too, I do not know or think that a one shot trial is actually that good a selection policy. Maybe we should have archery trials with a tiger running in at you and you trying to shoot it with a poisoned arrow. If you don't get the tiger, the tiger will eat you up. Those that do not get eaten up get to go to the Olympics. Simple way to get rid of chokers and we solve the issue of tigers not having enough food because human beings are taking up their jungles. Thoughts?
sameerph wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 12:26 pm
So, major discussion here I think is about shooting. There, I do not see how just 1 selection trial can be a criteria in a random sport like shooting. It is impossible to replicate olympics level mental pressure at any other event. So, it is very difficult to set a perfect criteria which will win us medals.
Is missing Olympic berth not enough mental pressure to match the actual event? I think subconsciously our athletes still carry the residue attitude of "Competing and representing country in Olympics is enough". Now imagine the harm such thinking would do if athletes know they are confirmed Olympics berth well before the event.
From what i remember shooting team to be sent for Tokyo was announced in March, 5 months ahead of event. And though 5 selection trials were held, i am not sure how much weightage was given. I think there was weightage for quota place won, prior world cups performance in the run upto Olympics and then these 5 selection trails. Some one with knowledge of criteria can confirm but i believe people like Apurvi Chandela and Manu were sitting pretty with a berth to Tokyo all but confirmed already by the time trials took place and they just had to perform not too bad in trials to be guaranteed a berth.
My point is NRAI should retrospect and improve its selection criteria this time around. There must be something horribly wrong to return empty handed for the quality of shooters our country had. NRAI should have experts who can take case study of better performing federation like Chinese Fed and comeup with a better plan this time. I may be wrong in saying 1 trial, but what ever is deemed better and proven selection criteria that should be adopted without making any exceptions to name and fame!
Parneet Kaur is only 18 and Aditi Gopichand Swami is only 16...
I know, I should get truly excited only when India manages to beat Korea in Archery, but this is World championships, and is some seriously good news, right?
Yes, this is good but unfortunately Compound archery is not an olympics event. We are really damn good at it. Hope we get 2-3 Asiad golds in Compound this time.
Yeah. Hopefully we will get something at Asiad. We don't even have quota spots at the Olympics in recurve, right? Is the Korean coach helping much yet? I don't follow Archery a whole lot (as I assume that our Archers will never come through )
No quota places in recurve here although our womens team reached QF. Last time top 8 in world championships got quotas, now they have changed the system and only top 3 teams qualify from here. So, we miss out. But, there are a lot of events still left. So, eventually both men and women team should get into top 12 which are the number of participating teams at Paris. But, beyond that I do not expect anything from archers.
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