Heena Sidhu: World Championships as important as Asian Games

The Asian Games will be followed by the World Championships and the Indian shooters are preparing simultaneously for both the competitions.

Heena Sidhu believes the Indian shooters will fare better in the Asian Games.

She is one of India’s biggest medal prospects and Heena Sidhu believes that the Indian shooters will do better in this edition of the Asian Games.

The former world No. 1, who will participate in the women’s 10m air pistol event, is happy with the preparations. “This is another chance to improve my performance. Hopefully, we will improve this time and may even win gold,” Heena said. She, however, was blunt enough to admit that athletes, after all, cannot guarantee a medal. “You can go there and perform. Our job is to perform and improve the scores,” she said.

The world championships will begin right after the Asian Games, and the shooters are also working hard for the prestigious tournament. “We are also preparing for the world championships. Both are important for us,” she said.

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While she is okay with the rule change, Heena admits that Asian Games is relatively tougher than Commonwealth Games. “This time our performance will be much better. We are not having same teams, so athletes will be prepared and rested. I have seen the performance of the Indian team and overall, I believe, it will be a better performance,” the former world No.1 said.

While she is confident of shooters doing well, the only worrying factor could be the fact that this is for the first time Jakarta will be hosting a shooting event. “We don’t know about the range,” Heena said.

Over the years, shooting has been one of the major medal disciplines for India and the shooters would be hoping to gun for glory in Indonesia.