Deepika Kumari’s passion and focus has made her one of India’s leading archer. Her transformation from a rickshaw driver’s daughter hailing from Jharkhand to India’s medal contender for Olympics is quite inspiring. She started her journey by using homemade bows and arrows using mangoes as her targets. It was only in 2006 when she joined the Tata Archery Academy she started using proper equipment and received a stipend of Rs 500 per month to support her training in archery.
Early footprints of her ability were seen in the year 2006, when at the age of twelve she won the junior compound competition in the Archery World Cup becoming only the second Indian to win the prestigious completion.
Further, Deepika showed an exceptional performance in the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games by winning a double gold. This got her recognition as an outstanding performance at CWG (Female) awards from Sahara Sports.
She further pepped her performance by winning her first World Cup individual stage recurve medal in Antalya, Turkey by defeating Lee Sung-Jin of Korea by six set points to four in the final. Her achievements ranked her the world number one in the Women’s Recursive Archery later that year.
Deepika has worked on her failures in Rio Olympics and is looking ahead to win a medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The starting point of her preparations include appointing a sports psychologist to help her with Nero Linguistic Programme to motivate and keep her mentally fit during the crucial match day.
