Olympics
Jonathan Selvaraj, ESPN 6y

Jyothi Surekha Vennam is finally hitting the bulls-eye

Olympic Sports, Archery

 

Compound archer Jyothi Surekha Vennam is philosophical about her recent run of form. "When you are not winning, you can't seem to win anything and when you start winning you just keep on winning," she says over the phone from Berlin.

The 22-year-old from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh has indeed been prolific of late. On Saturday at the Berlin World Cup she won two medals - a silver in the women's team event and a bronze in the mixed team. It took her medal haul for the World Cup season to 6 - three silver medals and as many bronze. By total medal count, that tally is the best by an Indian compound archer and the second best ever by any Indian archer - recurve specialist Deepika Kumari won a total of eight in 2011.

But Vennam is familiar with the other side of her axiom too. "I took part in 11 World Cups without winning anything. For a really long time I thought I was never ever going to win a World Cup medal," she says. It wasn't as if she lacked the talent. Ever since she made her international debut as a 15-year-old - winning a team bronze medal at the 2011 Asian Championships - Vennam has been consistently on the podium. Bronze at the 2014 Asian Games, gold at the 2015 Asian Championships, team gold at the 2016 World University Games and a team silver at the 2017 World Championships. It earned her an Arjuna Award last year. A medal at the World Cup (four of which take place each year) leading up to a World Cup Final eluded her.

The drought was all the more perplexing considering her start at her very first World Cup in Shanghai in 2012 where she finished fourth in the compound team event.

Vennam doesn't know what was lacking. Perhaps she hasn't able to concentrate entirely on her sport you might wonder? The only daughter of incredibly hard-driving parents (at 4-years-old she was trained to swim five kilometers across the Krishna River outside Vijayawada) she was expected to maintain high academic grades alongside archery. It isn't surprising that Vennam's worst year on the international circuit, 2016, when she struggled to find a place in the Indian squad for any of the World Cups, coincided with her final year of engineering.

She did manage to get her B. Tech (with distinction she adds) in Computer science and although she is now studying for an MBA, has been able to devote much more time to her sport. Yet World Cups came and went with no medal.

"At the 2017 Berlin World Cup, she finished fourth and once again she was very frustrated. But I told her that it wasn't as if she would never win a World Cup medal but she just had to want that medal more than anything," national coach Jiwanjot Singh says.

 

The turning point would come not at a World Cup but at the 2017 World Championships. Vennam would set her highest ever score and a new national record in the qualifying round - 698 out of 720. "That round gave the Indian team a really high seeding and we could get a very good draw for the team competition. That round was crucial in us winning a silver medal. And that also gave a lot of confidence to her because she realized how important she was for the team," says Jiwanjot.

Indeed Vennam's form would carry on to the 2018 season where in her 12th World Cup, at Shanghai in April, she would go on to win her first medal - a bronze -- in the mixed team event. "After winning that first medal, I was relieved more than anything. Because I had got that out of the way. I could concentrate simply on shooting," she says.

At the next World Cup in Antalya, she would improve the qualifying national record to 706/720 and add a women's team silver and a mixed team bronze. As a consequence of her wins, her ranking shot up to 10th in the world and fourth in Asia.

 

There is one thing that still rankles Vennam: none of her medals have come in the individual category. Coach Jiwanjot says a hairline fracture on her left foot is partly to blame. "She's been carrying that injury from the start of the season," he says. "Because of that she isn't able to do any cardiovascular training and so finds it difficult to maintain her heart rate over a long individual competition. It's easier in the team events, where she has to shoot her arrows alternately with her partners. In a team, her job is to shoot consistently and she does that very well. She's very strong mentally and soaks up any pressure that might come because of a bad shot by someone so that is a huge support for the rest of the team."

That's a problem he expects will be resolved by the next season. "Her plan will be to win her first World Cup Individual medal next year and then win another at the World Cup finals," says Jiwanjot.

The target for Vennam comes a lot earlier than that. "I've another goal. I haven't qualified for the World Cup finals so I want to make the most of the Asian Games," she says. "We (women) have only won a bronze medal in the team event last time around so I want to get a better medal this time."

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