New Delhi, Sep 9: Recently-retired Indian table tennis great Sharath Kamal has given himself 11 years to produce the country’s first Olympic medallist in the racket sport and German football club Borussia Dortmund could end up being his unlikely ally in pursuit of this path-breaking dream.
In his decorated two decade old career, the 43-year-old won plenty of medals at the Commonwealth Games and helped India end their barren run at the Asian Games but despite five Olympic appearances, he and the rest of his teammates could not get near the coveted podium.
Having retired from the sport in March, Sharath remains a man with strong purpose and clear vision. He is setting up a High Performance Centre (HPC) close to his hometown Chennai, a world class facility backed by the Tamil Nadu government, with a singular aim to produce an Olympic medallist.
“I’m looking at my main goal at this very moment is setting up the High Performance Centre, making it run and hopefully what I couldn’t achieve in my career of you know the Olympic medal, I hope I can live the dream through the young talents that are there here and I can support them in their career.
“Yeah. So we’re looking at 2036 Olympic Games. Hopefully it happens in India. That would be the best. Even if it doesn’t happen, still giving myself 11 years time,” said Sharath.
Sharath, who is busy with administrative roles at the International Table Tennis Federation and the Indian Olympic Association, will be the sporting director of the HPC while full-time coaches are being sought from Germany, China and Japan.
Sharath also revealed that he is in talks with German football club Borussia Dortmund to help his HPC in talent identification. The facility will be up and running by October.
Identifying talent between age 11-15 key
The HPC will be looking to work with the talent in the 11-15 age bracket so that they have enough time to ready for the 2036 Olympics.
“So it’s almost like two and a half Olympic cycles where we can identify talent between the age of 11 to 15 and grow with them and groom them at the same time. These days there’s a lot of sports science advancement that’s been available and which I feel like we can make use of it.”
Sharath and his team is looking to groom the players in three phases.
“So, if you’re identifying talent between the age group of 11 to 15, in 10-11 years’ time, they will be at their peak performance is what we can see. That is exactly where I also hit my peak around 22-23.
“The first phase when they’re in the age group between 11 to 15 for the first two years, I want to look at 50 to 60 kids, have a bunch of, a larger pool of kids where we are able to get them from across the country, put them into a good training structure.
“And the second stage will be after two to three years when there’ll be some weeding out and we’ll be able to close the group there between 25 to 40. And six to eight years from now, the focus pool will be around 15 to 20 players,” he said.
Borussia Dortmund help
Sharath knows that he can’t produce an Olympic medallist all by himself and will need technical support from experts in Germany, where he played a lot of table tennis at the club level. He would also love the experts from China and Japan to train the athletes in HPC but that is easier said than done considering the coaches from two Asian giants are not very forthcoming and language barrier is a major issue. (PTI)