A few months ago, Olympian Sawarn Singh was struggling with a painful back. Rowing puts a lot of stress on the lower back and it took some time for the 24-year-old Asian champion from Punjab to get back into the boat.
The Armyman, competing in his maiden Asian Games, gave it his all to win a bronze in the single sculls event at the Chengju Tangeum Lake on Thursday.
Sawarn was in the lead till the halfway mark of the 2000m event and though he lost the top spot after that, he fought back hard and virtually collapsed in exhaustion after the finish. Rescue boats were brought in to pull him out of the water as his boat toppled after the race.
Tough competition
“I went all out, the Asiad is a tough competition,” said Sawarn, son of a farmer from Mansa in Punjab who took up rowing in 2009 at the Army Centre at Pune. “I trained hard back home and tried hard here, but the Korean, who got the silver, was very good on home waters.”
Iranian Mohsen Shadi Naghadeh, the lightweight single sculls champion at the last Asiad in Guangzhou, won the gold while Kim Dongyong took the silver.
There was another bronze from rowing as the men’s eight team of Kapil Sharma, Ranjit Sinh, Bajrang Lal Takhar, P.U. Robin, Sawan Kumar, Azad Mohammed, Maninder Singh, Davinder Singh and Ahmed Mohammed finished behind China and Japan.
Incidentally, Bajrang had won the single sculls gold at Guangzhou four years ago.
India, which brought home five medals, including a gold and three silvers from the last Asiad, finished its rowing campaign in Incheon with just three bronze medals, showing how much the country has slipped in the Asian ladder.
“Nothing went wrong. We prepared as we were supposed to prepare, copybook style, it’s just that the competition got stronger,” said M.V. Sriram, Rowing Federation of India secretary, who is here with the team in Incheon. “They have really gone ahead. We have to go back and work harder.”
Expensive sport
Rowing is an expensive sport and Sriram said it needed to attract more youngsters in order to provide a bigger base to pick the national team.
But facility-wise, India has a long way to go to catch up with the best in Asia.
“Last year’s world championship was also held here.
“We don’t have permanent centres. We go to a place, lay a course, run a race and then go home. We don’t have a permanent centre where there is a grand-stand, where there is a boat house, a sauna and space for people to sit and train. We only go, make the course and take away the course when the regatta is over. There are no operable permanent courses,” lamented Sriram.
The results:
Men : Single sculls: 1. Mohsen Shadi Naghadeh (Iri) 7:05.66s; 2. Kim Dongyong (Kor) 7:06.17; 3. Sawarn Singh (Ind) 7:10.85.
Doubles sculls: 1. Zhang Liang & Dai Jun (Chn) 6:24.69s; 2. Wang Ming Hui & Yu Tsung Wei (Tpe) 6:29.11; 3. Shojaei Seyedmojtaba & Amir Rahnamal Ronaghi (Iri) 6:32.22; 5. Om Prakash & Dattu Baban Bhokanal (Ind) 6:37.02.
Lightweight quadruple sculls : 1. Yu Chenggang, Li Hui, Fan Junjie & Wang Texin (Chn) 6:01.15s; 2. Chow Kwong Wing, Tang Chiu Mang, Leung Chun Shek & Kwan Ki Cheong (Hong Kong) 6:07.39; 3. Ardi Isadi, Tanzil Hadid, Muhad Yakin & Ihram Ihram (Ina) 6:09.90; 5. Rakesh Raliya, Vikram Singh, Sonu Laxmi Narain & Shokendar Tomar (India) 6:16.05.
Eight : 1. China (5:46.70s); 2. Japan (5:50.04); 3. India (5:51.84).
