India international archers denied participation in Olympic selection trials for failure to produce Covid-19 negative report | More sports News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: The first day of archery selection trials in Jamshedpur on Tuesday had its fair share of drama when five international archers, all from Assam, were stopped from appearing for trials after they failed to produce a Covid-19 negative RT-PCR report to the organisers, which was a mandatory requirement to participate in the event.
Archers Sanjay Boro, Dhaniram Basumatary, Mukesh Boro, Promila Daimary and Sonali Basumatary weren’t allowed to take the field for trials in the absence of RT-PCR report.
The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), as spelt out by the Archery Association of India (AAI) before the trials, required all participants to undergo mandatory Covid-19 testing at their respective home cities and carry the negative report obtained not more than 48 hours before arriving in Jamshedpur.
Since these men and women recurve archers arrived straight for the trials on Tuesday morning without the Covid-19 negative report, the organisers refused them entry to the field and told them to leave.
Similarly, the organisers had booked a nearby hotel for the participants to stay, but there was no provision for them to get tested for Covid-19. The organisers had allowed participants to check-in at the hotel from Monday onwards, but surprisingly only the temperature checks were done and no arrangements were made for the testing at the hotel itself.
The three-day trials from November 24-26 at the JRD Tata Sports Complex will see four men and four women recurve archers being picked for the ongoing Tokyo Olympic preparatory national camp at the ASI Pune.
The AAI had released the list of 40 men and 18 women archers who were eligible to take part in the trials. The trials are being conducted by the Sports Authority of India (SAI).
The selected archers will join the core group of eight men and eight women archers, who are already part of the ongoing camp in Pune. Some of the leading archers like Atanu Das, Tarundeep Rai, Jayanta Talukdar, Deepika Kumari and L. Bombayla Devi, among others, are part of the camp.