The Apollo Tyres Mission 2018 initiative on Sunday announced its first batch of fifteen trainees who will be groomed to get India a Grand Slam title within the next ten years.
Mission to find tennis champions by 2018 starts but it’s a long road ahead
CHANDIGARH: The Apollo Tyres Mission 2018 initiative on Sunday announced its first batch of fifteen trainees who will be groomed to get India a Grand Slam title within the next ten years. The objective is tough and there is a lot that can go wrong if one is seeing into the future.
Apollo must be applauded for being the first Indian corporate to reach beyond the narrow now of player endorsement to actually seek to build champions. A sum of 100 crores has been marked out by Apollo to groom future winners in collaboration with Mahesh Bhupathi.
The initiative is all the more laudable given the mess that the AITA has made of its attempts to mould players from India. The latest being the fate of three of our best juniors that AITA pledged it support to — Sanam Singh, Jeevan Nedunchezhian and Vivek Shokeen. While the first two have moved on to colleges in the US, Shokeen plods along, sans a good travelling coach or trainer.
The federation has put in place a commendable tournament structure for Indians to earn international points in home conditions but beyond that it is a colossal failure at providing players the right kind of economic and technical inputs required to move from being brilliant juniors to consistent performers on the senior tour.
On its part, the Apollo Mission is spectacular in concept but as of now it is not clear just how Bhupathi intends to go about it. For starters the children are going to be based at his facility — Tennis Village — in Bangalore under people who have limited credentials of having worked with small kids.
In fact, the Tennis Village has been quite a failure at nurturing juniors even when it was identified as a nodal centre by AITA some years back. Bhupathi was refreshingly candid while clarifying, “It was a purely commercial venture,” before he went on to add the silly bit that “I, Rohan Bopanna and Sania Mirza are all products of the Tennis Village.” Bhupathi himself was already an established player by the time the facility came up and its contribution to Bopanna and Mirza’s formative years is, at best, limited.
The involvement of Prahlad Srinath, Sandeep Kirtane and Manisha Malhotra in the project is heartening. All three had given the dream of big-time tennis their best shot and as such have a personal stake in ensuring that the dreams of the next generation do not get stunted like their own did. Bhupathi, however, may still need to rope in some more people who have worked longer with beginners.
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