Nethra Kumanan offers a simple reason on being asked why sailing caught her fancy.
“It isn’t always the fastest, strongest and toughest that wins. The sport offers a certain amount of freedom,” said the 23-year-old, who will be the first ever woman sailor from India to compete at the Olympics next month. “Every little decision you make matters. The weather is different every day. Conditions are different each day.”
Unlike most other sports, sailing is as much a battle with the elements of nature as it is a race against other sailors. If the wind speed doesn’t get you, the tide might. If your upper-body strength doesn’t falter in the face of the repeated assault by the elements, your mind might make a minor miscalculation as you zig and zag your way through the course.
Even if you master all of the elements, your opponents might do it better.
On top of that, sailors don’t just race once at an event: at next month’s Olympics, for example, Nethra will compete in 10 races—or heats—over a span of five days after which the 10 best sailors compete in the medal race.
“On some race days, the water is still. A mirror! Nothing’s moving. Other days, there’s a storm,” said Nethra.
In a bid to gain an advantage, sailors check meteorological forecasts and wind predictions before they actually go to the course. Some make sure they talk to locals to get a grip on the vagaries of the weather they could face. But come race days, the futility of predicting weather becomes apparent.
“At most events, the weather does a complete 180-degree turn. You’ll get something you’ve never seen before. So, on the one hand, it’s important to know the expected conditions beforehand. On the other, we have to be ready to adapt,” she said. “It’s one of the most complex sports there is.”
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The ‘complex’ world of sailing caught Nethra’s fancy when she was 12. In her school days, the Kumanans would enroll their two kids in every summer camp conceivable, from performing arts like singing and dancing to sports like tennis and basketball. One day, Nethra’s mother, Sreeja, stumbled upon an article in a newspaper about a sailing camp, and the couple decided to give it a shot for their two kids.
“We took the two to the Chennai port trust for a week for the camp. After that there was no looking back,” Nethra’s father VC Kumanan said at a virtual press conference organised by the Go Sports Foundation, which supports her. “They loved the sport so much!”
From that year on, his routine on weekends started to revolve around taking Nethra and her brother for sailing classes.
Despite Nethra showing promise in the sport early on—even winning a couple of national events—the Olympics was never a dream that the family had until 2014, when India’s chief national coach planted the seed of Nethra being good enough to compete at events like the Asian Games in their minds.
The Kumanans, by then, had realised that for their daughter to rub shoulders against the world’s best, she would need to move abroad to train. After some thought, the tiny country of Israel was picked and it became Nethra’s base as she chased a spot at the Rio Olympics.
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Nethra almost made the cut for Rio 2016.
Not making the cut for Rio was heartbreaking. But faltering while being aware that she was good enough to make it to Rio was devastating for the young sailor.
In the aftermath of that heartbreak, Nethra took a year-long break from the sport.
“I was a lot younger then, and had spent nearly two years in Israel, having made a lot of personal sacrifices and spending a lot of money,” said Nethra at a virtual press conference organised by the Sports Authority of India (SAI). Those factors weighed heavily on her mind at the Asian qualification event for Rio 2016 to the point where they constricted her ability to perform at the event.
“When I didn’t qualify, I took a step back. I went home. Just packed my bags and left. The rest of the year, I didn’t sail, except for a national event,” she said.
When the 2018 Asian Games started to appear on the horizon, Nethra found her appetite to compete again.
Two years after Rio 2016, Nethra made it to the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta. But here too, there was heartbreak in store, albeit of a slightly different kind.
“The bronze medal at Jakarta was something I thought I could have—should have!—won. There was a lot of pressure I put on myself. I started out okay, and a medal was in my grasp. But then I let it go,” said Nethra, who finished fifth.
In hindsight, Nethra realised, while she was good enough to compete at the Olympics in Rio, and win a medal at the Jakarta Asiad, there were facets of her as an athlete that needed to be chiseled into shape.
“I was good enough even in 2016 then (to make it to the Olympics), but I had to bridge the gap in certain aspects. I needed a lot of consistency in training. I needed to make sure that I stuck to my priorities. Second thing was working on my mental training. I didn’t handle stress very well in the qualifiers for Rio 2016,” admitted Nethra.
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For most months of the year, the pristine waters off the coast of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria are Nethra’s home.
The city, while based in Gran Canaria, which is one of Spain’s Canary Islands, offers sailors the best mix of wind conditions, waves and temperature. While technically part of Spain, Gran Canaria is off the west African coast, which allows decent temperatures for sailing, and unlike most European countries, does not get too frigid in the winters.
Tamas Eszes, Nethra’s coach, first met the Indian at the 2015 World Laser Radial Women's Championship in Oman’s Al Mussanah. While he was primarily there as a coach of another promising young athlete, who he was hoping to groom into an Olympic champion someday, he was also hoping to spot talent he could coach to the Olympics at his sailing club in Gran Canaria.
Nethra, in those days, was also scrambling to make the cut for Rio Olympics. She was ranked in the 200s back then, a far way behind her current world ranking of 54.
“We wanted to spot future clients from countries where they cannot create their own sailing teams because they don’t have enough sailors. Our idea was to bring together talented sailors from ‘small’ nations and get them to train with us in a year-round sailing program,” said Eszes.
While Nethra’s event — the laser radial — is a singlehanded event, having a partner to push you in training is critical. At Gran Canaria, Eszes has put together a multi-cultural training group from many nations that include India’s Nethra, Greece’s Vasileia Karachaliou, Spain’s Cristina Pujol, Romania’s Ebru Bolat, France’s Marrie Barue and Switzerland’s Rosine Baudet.
Eszes and his team at Sailing Academy Gran Canaria make it a point to not have two sailors from the same country to avoid having internal “trouble” that can brew between two athletes chasing qualification quota available for the same nationality.
While Eszes and Nethra did not stay in touch after they met at the Worlds in Oman, it was in 2018 that Nethra’s family contacted the coach to take her under his wing. In September that year, Nethra’s ranking broke into double digits for the first time in her career.
“We took her in our program and immediately fell in love with her personality as an athlete,” said Eszes.
Before she found a home in Spain, Nethra had also trained in Malta for a while. But the sailing base there lacked training partners.
“The laser radial class is a slow boat. So, it involves a lot of tactics. It’s a one-design boat. It boils down to what the sailor does rather than equipment or the kind of set-up that we have. To have training partners, who are already up there at the world level and know what works on the course, is great,” said Nethra.
“Training partners are like horses,” chuckled Vishnu Saravanan, another Indian sailor to have qualified for Tokyo, albeit in the laser class event.
Just as Nethra is based in Gran Canaria, Vishnu is based in Malta.
“The first day I started training with that group in Malta it was terrible,” said Vishnu, trying to contextualise the importance of being part of a good training group. “I didn’t know that boat could go so fast. Then I started to learn by copying what they do. At the end of that training camp, I was able to match them in five out of 10 speed tests.”
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Nethra, too, noticed a transformation of her own in Gran Canaria.
When she started training under Eszes, she would tend to struggle in light wind conditions. Her body weight and technique were just right, observed Eszes. But her fine combination movements on the vessel needed sharpening.
“I gained a lot more speed and a lot more confidence in myself under Eszes. The stint also helped me build routines like a full-time professional athlete,” said Nethra.
Around the same time that she started training under Eszes, Nethra also started working with sports psychologist Nimrod Mon Brokman, who is the co-founder of Behavioural Foresight.
“I needed that because I couldn’t handle pressure for a long time. All the effort I would put into training, I would expect it to pay off when I was competing. But I would lose my focus when I was racing. With my psychologist, I’ve been working on prioritising and focusing on relevant things,” said Nethra, who added, “People think that you need a psychologist for motivation. But I don’t lack motivation. I needed a psychologist to help me direct my focus in the right direction.”
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The sport of sailing has become much more professional in the past decade, believes Eszes, who’s been to two editions of the Games as a competitor himself.
“Athletes now sail full-time since the past 10 years. There’s scant time for studies. The training is non-stop. I believe that at this point, it takes six years to work on a sailor and prepare them to compete at the Olympics,” he said before adding that women sailors start to peak around the age of 26. “This is not to say young sailors cannot qualify for the Olympics or perform well there. The problem with younger sailors is consistency.”
Nethra’s sports psychologist Brokman said that sailors are usually a lot older than when they make it to the Olympics. Brokman by virtue of having worked with many Israeli sailors has observed the sport up close.
“For Nethra to make it to the Olympics at 23 is phenomenal. Usually, competitors at the Games are much older and way more experienced,” said Brokman. “She’s one of the most motivated athletes I have worked with. She’s also studying engineering, which not many professional athletes can manage simultaneously with their Olympic-level training.”
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At the time when countries started enforcing lockdowns due to COVID-19 in 2020, Nethra was to race at an event in Abu Dhabi. But when that race was postponed, and the rest of the calendar seemed uncertain, Nethra made the decision to return to Spain, rather than go home to Chennai.
“Nethra was really tough. She stayed for over a year at our sailing base without a break. She’s one of our youngest athletes. We know our work is very monotonous. The athlete needs to go home from time to time,” said Eszes.
When the lockdown in Spain happened, Nethra was stuck indoors for nearly three months with two other sailors. In those months, Eszes had a home gym set up so they could work on their endurance, particularly since this is a sport where sailors can burn as many as 4,000 calories in a day of competition. With no exposure to the seas, Nethra used to time to look inwards and focus on aspects like nutrition and mental fitness.
The monotony of training was broken by studies. Some days Nethra would wake up as early as 3.30 in the morning to attend online classes for a degree in mechanical engineering before her training session at 9.30 am.
In the beginning of the lockdown, when Nethra was stuck at Gran Canaria, she said “things worked out well.”
“(I got to) train non-stop and focus on the sport non-stop. It’s difficult to do the same kind of training in India. I don’t have anyone in India to train with or sail with.”
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Nethra’s qualification makes her the first woman sailor from India to make it to an Olympic Games. Nine sailors from India have gone to the Olympics before, but usually on continental quotas. Nethra, along with Vishnu, and the pair of Varun Thakkar and KC Ganapathy, are the highest number of sailors competing at a single Olympic edition from India.
“We were lacking stars in the sport since 2008. Till 2008, we were getting (continental) nominations or wildcard entries in yachting (as sailing was known before Sydney 2000) at the Olympics. But after that, there was a lull. Now, history has been made, as we’re going to see four sailors go to Tokyo. The moment you get a star in a sport, recognition and funding for the discipline follows,” said Captain Jitendra Dixit, the joint secretary general for Yachting Association of India (YAI).
The YAI has found itself in choppy waters more often than not in recent years. Be it allegations from former chief national coach Ian Warren or selection issues that necessitated sailor Varsha Gautam to knock on the doors of the court (before Asian Games 2018), the YAI has been embroiled in many controversies. But the qualification of four sailors gives the sport an impetus that it has never had.
While YAI currently has 54 member clubs spread across India, many of them in cities along the vast coastline, it depends totally on government funding. The federation received Rs 1.11 crore through the Annual Calendar for Training and Competition in the current Olympic cycle, with a handful of organisations like Go Sports backing select athletes based on the promise they show.
“Unfortunately, corporate funding or sponsorship is almost nil. But the annual budget from Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (MYAS) has increased by 60 to 70 percent in the last couple of years. With four sailors going to Tokyo, SAI has included all of them in TOPS,” said Captain Dixit.
“With any athlete, the better the results, the more support they get,” said Nethra, who also added: “Until now, whoever I told what I did, pictured I was rowing rather than sailing.”
Her qualification for the Olympics gives YAI a poster girl at a time when they’re trying to raise the participation of women in the sport.
Captain Dixit said the federation was trying to get girls’ participation up by 50 percent by 2024. “As of now, we’re in the ratio of 30-70. To achieve this, we’ve taken decisions like waiving off the registration and entry fees for events by 50 percent. Sailing is an expensive sport. There are usually conditions that we need a minimum of a certain number of teams registered to compete in a race for them to go ahead. But in India, in certain classes we don’t have many teams sailing, we tend not to have the minimum number of competitors required. So, we have done away with that restriction for women,” Captain Dixit said.
Once participation grows, the federation hopes that sailors can start training in Indian conditions which, ironically, are much more suited to sailors than those in European countries.
“A lot of our country has a coastline. And we have great sea conditions to sail. The water is warm. In Europe, the water is cold, so it’s harder to sail there. People there ask us why we come to Europe to train,” said Vishnu.
Sailing is not a sport where Asian countries have traditionally done well at the Olympics. Barring the odd medal for China in consecutive editions, the last time any other Asian country won a medal at the Games was at Athens 2004, when Japan took home a solitary medal. While the sport’s traditional powerhouses include Great Britain, USA, and Australia, between 15 to 20 nations have claimed medals at every edition of the Olympics since Atlanta 1996.
Sailing is a sport that struggles for visibility, not just in India or Asia, but worldwide.
The fact that you cannot get live audiences closer to the action at sea, has also hindered its popularity.
“It’s difficult to cover the sport because it’s on water. It’s not like badminton or athletics, where we can have live coverage all the time,” reasoned Vishnu, as he talked about the sport’s low profile.
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Nethra’s attitude going into her first Olympics is to assess herself against the best while also getting acclimatised with the cauldron of pressure that an Olympics can be.
In a country where sporting expectations oscillate between non-existent to sky-high, Nethra is very circumspect.
“A lot of people go in to the Games with a lot of expectations, which an Olympics forces on athletes,” said Nethra who adds earnestly, “It’s very early in my career, so I’m not expecting much at Tokyo. But at Paris and LA, my goals will be much higher.”
“We’re at the beginning of this journey. Tokyo 2020 is just the first step,” was Eszes’ assessment. “Sailors have to go to two or three Olympic Games to be able to perform. The first Games, it gets very hard to keep the focus on. The second one gets much easier mentally. Paris 2024 is just three years away.”
Her father, VC Kumanan, preaches a straightforward approach to managing expectations.
“The only way to manage expectations is to not have expectations,” he said poker-faced.
from Firstpost Sports Latest News https://ift.tt/3haiprz
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