World Cup: Indian archers to leave for Italy

New Delhi: A six-member Indian archery team will leave tonight to participate in the 46th World Outdoor Target Archery Championship to be staged at Turin, Italy from July 3 to 10.

Archery Association of India president Vijay Kumar Malhotra today gave a warm send-off to the team that leaves tonight. "The World Archery Championship will be very important for us, not just for the World titles but for London Olympics-2012 as this tournament is the primary qualifier tournament to earn berth for Olympic Games," Malhotra said. "Our prime agenda and focus is to qualify for the ensuring Olympics showing our best ever performance at World Championship," he added. For qualification, our recurve men and recurve women teams have to enter among the first eight teams facing strong challenge from more than 600 archers from about 90 countries who will shoot for the titles, medals and Olympic berths.International Archery Federation allocated 32 places out of 64 per gender for the London Games to World Championship. There will be subsequent Continental Qualification Tournaments (13 places) and two Final World Team Qualification tournaments qualifiers (13 places ) until the Olympic Games. The host nation will get three quota places per gender automatically and similar vacancies will be filled up by Tripartite Commission.India`s recurve men`s team will have Jayanta Talukdar, Tarundeep Rai and Rahul Banerjee who won team silver medal in the 1st World Cup in Croatia, while the recurve women`s team comprises of Deepika Kumari, Laishram Bombayla Devi, Chekrovolu Swuro who bagged the team silver in the 2nd World Cup in Turkey. Purnima Mahato and Ravi Shankar as coaches and Jaideep Das Choudhary as physiotherapist will be accompanying the contingent. PTI