Tokyo 2020-bound India shooters to get vaccinated on Thursday ahead of Croatia tour

The European Championship is scheduled to be held from May 20 to June 6 and the squad will be staying back in Zagreb for training before directly leaving for Tokyo.

Representative Image: All members of the Indian shooting squad, including coaches and officials, would be vaccinated by May 6 before their departure on May 11.

Olympic-bound Indian shooters will get vaccinated on Thursday before leaving for Zagreb, Croatia on May 11 in a chartered flight to participate in the European Championship, the National Rifle Association of India (NRAI) said on Monday.

The competition is scheduled to be held from May 20 to June 6 and the squad will be staying back in Zagreb for training before directly leaving for Tokyo to participate at the Olympics beginning in July.

"All the arrangements have been made in association with the Croatian Shooting Federation," the governing body of the sport in the country said in a release.

"The NRAI has also made arrangements for a chartered flight for the entire squad to fly to Zagreb, in order to nullify the threat of contracting infection to the maximum."

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India is facing a devastating second wave of COVID-19, which has left the health care system in complete shambles with most hospitals struggling with essential supplies like oxygen, ventilators, beds and life-saving medicines.

The apex body said that the shooters will be vaccinated on Thursday ahead of their departure.

"It was also announced that all members of the squad including coaches and officials, would be vaccinated by May 6, 2021, before their departure," NRAI said.

"The NRAI has also accommodated the private coaches and support staff of the Shooters in the arrangement."

There will be nine coaches for the 13 rifle and pistol shooters. However, Samaresh Jung, Jaspal Rana and Ronak Pandit were unable to take up the long stint abroad for various reasons.

Two foreign coaches in Oleg Mikhailov and Pavel Smirnov have been drafted in alongside Deepali Deshpande, Manoj Kumar, Suma Shirur, and Ved Prakash Pilaniya. Divyansh Singh Panwar’s coach Deepak Kumar Dubey, Elavenil Valarivan’s coach from 'Gun for Glory', Neha Chavan and Apurvi Chandela’s coach Rakesh Manpat will also be part of the training squad. There will be four physiotherapists - Sumit Arora, Zeinia Samar, Sumita Jain and Shloka Varvatkar, apart from two physical trainers, Akshay Bhapkar and Har Kaur. Apurvi, Elavenil, Anjum Moudgil, Tejaswini Sawant, Manu Bhaker, Yashaswini Singh Deswal and Rahi Sarnobat will be the women shooters. Divyansh Sigh, Deepak Kumar, Sanjeev Rajput, Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar, Saurabh Chaudhary and Abhishevk Verma will be the men. Even though the NRAI had announced reserves and assured matching training for them along with the Tokyo-bound squad, they could not be fitted into this plan. The two Olympic-bound skeet shooters Angad Vir Singh Bajwa and Mairaj Ahmad Khan will be based in Italy.

(With inputs from Kamesh Srinivasan)