NETHRA KUMANAN: THE TRAILBLAZER OF INDIAN WOMEN SAILING

NETHRA KUMANAN

Introduction

No one in India has had this success before. Nethra Kumanan is the first Indian sailor to qualify for the Olympics by winning first place in an international tournament. Besides, Nethra will be the first Indian woman sailor to participate in the Olympics.

How She Get the Quota for the Tokyo Olympics

Nethra qualified for the Olympics by becoming the first in the Laser Radial event of the Mussanah Open Championship 2021 at the Millennium Resort in Mussanah, Oman. Laser Radial is a singlehanded boat, which means that it is sailed by only one person. And it is also the same place where she started her carrier at the under21 level in 2013. Earlier, nine Indian sailors took part in the Olympics. They are all but men. And no one has qualified directly in this way to succeed in any tournament. Rather everyone qualified to go to the Olympics through Quota Place. From that side, Nethra wrote a new history. She got sixth place in the medal round and overall she got second place.

But behind her success in qualifying for the Olympics has a lot of hard work.

Childhood & Introduce with Sailing

Nethra was born in Tamilnadu on 21st august 1997. At the age of 12, she was introduced to sailing for the first time when a sailing summer camp was organized by Tamilnadu Sailing Association in her school.

At that time younger Nethra had an interest in tennis, basketball, and also in cycling. She had also a great passion for the classical Indian dance Bharatnatyam. But to create a new interest in this sailing, she had to leave Bharatanatyam dance in the end. But Bharatanatyam had formed her, ingraining esteems like control, to do difficult work and commitment, which helps her today to take sailing as an integral part of her life. She completed her engineering at SRM College of Chennai. She won the national championship twice and she also got runner-up position on another occasion two times. She also got her first platform finish when an international competition came at the India International Regatta held in Chennai in 2014.

Achievements

Nowadays Nethra Kumanan is an accomplished sailor. She took participate in both the 2014 and 2018 Asian Games and her best completion to get the fourth position in 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia.

But she was disappointed with this position because she expected better results.

But Nethra Kumanan knows to come back. In 2020, she became the first Indian woman to get a world cup medal in sailing. She got the bronze medal in this world cup in Miami, USA.

After winning this world cup medal she told “Most people don’t know sailing exists in India. Our sports are cricket, football, or hockey and it’s more the navy or the army that sail.”

Training For Tokyo Olympics

In present days Nethra gets her training at Canary Island in Spain under her Hungarian coach Tamas Eszes who is a two-time Olympian.

She told that sailing is very different more mental than any other sports that she tried earlier. She also told that this sport takes a lot of time in the water but it’s all worth it. She quoted “in this sports, you can get to travel the world, meet people from different countries and experience them trying to do their best and you try to do better than them,”.

Conclusion

However, she is now eyeing to take her best spot at the Tokyo Olympics. She knows that it will be tough for her, but she can do it. We all hope that her efforts will never fail and that she will be able to become a significant placeholder in this Olympics. 

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