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New Delhi, Dec 27 (PTI) Olympic, World Cup and World Championship medallist shooters, including Swapnil Kusale, Arjun Babuta and Anjum Moudgil, have voiced their support for their long-serving coach Deepali Deshpande for the prestigious Dronacharya Award.
The award is given to coaches to honour their outstanding work and for enabling athletes to achieve excellence in their chosen sport in top international competitions.
Having dedicated nearly 40 years of her life to the sport, including as a markswoman herself, Deepali has emerged as one of the contenders for the award.
Kusale won the bronze medal in the men's 50m rifle 3-positions shooting event at the 2024 Paris Olympics, becoming the first Indian to finish on the podium in this particular event at the Games.
Moudgil has also had a very successful shooting career, winning multiple medals in top global events such as the ISSF World Championships, World Cups, Asian Championships and Commonwealth Games.
Besides Kusale and Moudgil, other established shooters to have expressed their support for their coach Deepali include Asian Games gold medallist Sift Kaur Samra, Olympian and Asian Championship gold medallist Arjun Babuta, World Championship gold-medal winner Akhil Sheoran and Asian Shooting Championship winner Shriyanka Sadangi.
All these shooters are being trained by Deepali for many years now and helped them make the transition from developmental to elite levels of the precision sport.
"I fully support her (coach Deepali Deshpande) for the Dronacharya Awrad," Moudgil said in her affidavit, attributing her success to the former shooter who has also served as India's high-performance coach in the past.
"I hereby declare that I won a bronze medal at the Paris Summer Olympic Games 2024 in the 50 metres Rifle 3 Positions men under the guidance of my coach Mrs. Deepali Deshpande. She has been coaching me since 2012..." Kusale said while declaring his support for Deepali in his affidavit.
Rifle shooter Deepali, 55, is an Olympian herself and represented India at the Asian Games and Asian Shooting Championships among others. She was a member of the team that clinched silver at the Busan Asian Games in 2002 in the 10m air rifle team event.
She has mentored the current crop of Indian shooters and has been a part of their development since they first entered the shooting range.
Deepali started her coaching career in 2010 at the club level and then came in as a chief coach for the junior team when the National Rifle Association of India (NRAI) launched the junior coaching programme. This is where she met Moudgil, Kusale and others.
After the Tokyo Olympics, held under the shadow of the Covid pandemic, Deepali's progress did not pan out the way she wanted it to, but she continued to work relentlessly on her mentees and it bore fruit as she sent six of her wards to the Paris Games
"Having done coaching for so many years and having worked on the shooters, I think I too deserve a bit of recognition. If I am given an award, it will not just be a recognition of my performance as a coach but it will also recognise the efforts and achievements of my shooters," Deepali told PTI on Friday.
While Kusale finished a creditable third on the podium when the world's biggest sporting spectacle was in progress in the French capital, Babuta missed the bronze medal in the men's 10m air rifle final by 0.9 points.
This comes a few days after a controversy erupted over the shocking exclusion of double Olympic-medallist Manu Bhaker for this year's Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna award. A top sports ministry source though later asserted that the names were yet to be finalised and she would be there when the final list is unveiled in the coming days.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
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