Shooting World Cup Bhopal: China’s second string contingent steals the thunder from India | More sports News – Times of India

FOCUS ON DATA ANALYSIS
For the last one year, since Dr Pierre Beauchamp joined the Indian setup as the high performance director of the National Rifle Association of India, a lot of emphasis has been put on numbers.
And Dr Beauchamp was certainly not disappointed with the results in Bhopal.
“I think it went very well. One of the facts is that we were concentrating on qualification to podium finishes. In Cairo we had 50 per cent conversion in terms of qualification score to podium finishes and here it was 84 per cent. So that was an improvement,” the Canadian, who has been an ice hockey player & coach and has had stints with the International Olympic Committee and the PGA Tour, told Timesofindia.com.
The NRAI has invested big time big in data analytics over the last one year and is trying to set up a high performance team under Dr Beauchamp.
The idea of working with numbers existed earlier as well, but national rifle coach Joydeep Karmakar says it was never implemented like it has been over the past 12 months.
“It is happening in a more structured way now,” Karmakar said talking to Timesofindia.com.
“I think the coaches now are much more comfortable doing the technical job and there are different departments that are being taken care of. There is a systematic way. This has come in over the last one year and will definitely yield some good results in the future as well. Not only for Paris (Olympics 2024), but I am talking even beyond.
“It is of great help to the coaches. We get the numbers and then we have a different dimension to work on as well,” added Karmakar, who came agonizingly close to winning a medal at the 2012 London Olympics before finishing fourth.
“It is very important to sustain in a way that we are not chance winners but consistent winners. I think the development and movement has already started,” Karmakar further told TimesofIndia.com.
There are four sports psychologists now working with the shooters, as a greater emphasis is put on the mental aspect of things since the high hopes of a potential medal-winning show in Tokyo were dashed with just one shooter (Saurabh Chaudhary in 10m air pistol) making it to the finals of an event.
The data being collected includes parameters such as technical, tactical, physical, mental as well as emotional well-being, with a person sitting in the stands dedicatedly taking down notes which are later analysed and integrated by Dr Beauchamp himself.
THE CHINESE DOMINATION
But one thing that data analytics will have to look at closely after this edition of the World Cup is the comparison between the Indian and Chinese shooters and the almost complete domination of Chinese shooters, despite many of them not being the first-choice players for the country on the bigger stages like the World Championships and Olympics.
The Chinese not only won 8 of the 10 gold medals on offer, but in some of those top-place finishes the competition was well and truly left behind by quite a distance.
“The kind of performances the Chinese team has produced here, I have not seen in recent years,” Karmakar told TimesofIndia.com. “It was exceptional. The scores you see from them, you see them shooting in the finals. Even their RPO shooters (those not competing for medals), four-five of them are in the top eight bracket. This is amazing.”
The World Championships in August and the Asian Games a month or so after that will be the next two big tournaments for Indian shooters, not to forget the quota places to be won in the next 12-15 months, leading up to the Paris Olympics.
There is a lot to play for.