IMAGE: India women’s boxing head coach Bhaskar Bhatt with Nikhat Zareen. Photograph: Boxing Federation of India
Months ahead of the Asian Games, Bhaskar Bhatt has quit as the head coach of the Indian women’s boxing team to concentrate on his new role as the high performance director at the Sports Authority of India (SAI).
The development comes a little over two months before the Asian Games in September, which is also the first Olympic qualifiers for the boxers from the continent.
Earlier this month, Bhatt had been appointed as boxing high performance director at SAI. In his new role, he will be overseeing both men’s and women’s boxing across all SAI National Centres of Excellence (NCOEs).
“When I was named the SAI high performance director for boxing a few days back it came with a lot of responsibilities. I wanted to do justice to my new role,” Bhatt, who is in Kazakhstan with a second string Indian team for the Elorda Cup , told PTI.
“At the national camp (in NIS Patiala), the high performance director (Bernard Dunne) is there and the foreign coach (Dmitry Dmitruk) is also there to assess and guide the girls so I requested that I be allowed to concentrate on the my new role full time,” he added.
Indian boxing has been going through a lot of changes since Irishman Bernard Dunne’s arrival as the high performance director in October last year.
In February, Dronacharya awardee C A Kuttappa returned as the head coach of the Indian men’s boxing team for a second stint, a decision made by the Boxing Federation of India (BFI) on the advice of Dunne.
Kuttappa replaced Narender Rana, who was appointed as the chief coach in October 2021.
Soon after, Dmitry Dmitruk was brought in as the foreign coach for both the men’s and women’s teams. And now, Bhatt has left his position as the women’s team head coach.
He had been named the women’s head coach in November 2021. Before that, he was with the youth team since 2017 and had served as assistant coach in the senior women’s camp from 2005 to 2012.
Under his tutelage, Indian boxers brought home three medals – one gold and two bronze – from the 2022 World Championships in Istanbul.
He also worked with Dunne and Dmitruk when four boxers became world champions here in March.
Among the other changes, Dunne has changed the selection process by getting rid of trials. Instead boxers now go through a three-week camp where they are evaluated on various parameters, following which a ranking list is compiled and the top-ranked pugilist is selected for big-ticket events.
Currently only Nikhat Zareen and Lovlina Borgohain have qualified for the Asian Games. All other boxers in the national camp are currently undergoing assessment for the continental showpiece.
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