Exclusive! Asian Games 2023: Shaili Singh looks to 'feed off crowd energy' in Hangzhou

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Asian Games 2023: Indian women's long jump has been often synonymous with the great Anju Bobby George. A trailblazer in Indian athletics, the national record holder (6.83 metre) was the first to break the duck at the World Athletics Championships with a bronze in Paris in 2003.

A year before the historic success, she left her mark at the Asian Games in Busan with a historic gold medal, making her the first Indian woman to do so in the long jump. Two decades later, her protege Shaili Singh is expected to continue Anju Bobby George's legacy at the Asian Games 2023.

The teenager's name has been making the rounds in world athletics since her unprecedented silver medal at the World U-20 Championships in Nairobi 2021. Aged just 17 at that time, Shaili Singh missed the gold by just a centimetre while establishing herself as the rightful heiress to the long jump queen.

Her coach Robert Bobby George, a Dronacharya Awardee, has no doubt in his apprentice, who is long touted to break the long-standing record. Shaili Singh, in fact, laid a strong claim for the record at the beginning of the season, when she jumped 6.76m at the Indian Grand Prix in Bengaluru in May.

However, more often than not, most of the Indian athletes, barring Neeraj Chopra, have struggled to replicate their best performances at the biggest of stages. One doesn't have to look far but glance at the dire strait of male long jumpers at the World Athletics Championships in September when they barely managed an 8m-plus jump combined after reaching Budapest as world-leading jumpers.

Shaili Singh too had a humble debut at the Worlds with a best effort of 6.40m in her three attempts, placing her 24th in 36-athlete qualification rounds. While the event was a learning curve for her that three jumps are all she may get to prove her worth despite months of hard work, the athlete is not someone, who is buoyed by the burden of expectations on her.

"I find myself to be lucky that there is such expectation placed on me and I am grateful to all of you," a confident Shaili Singh told myKhel during an interaction back in June. "People keep mentioning that I am going to break the national record but I never see it as a problem. I enjoy the attention and expectation shown in me."

For a teenager, Shaili has always been smart enough not to get ahead of herself and take the undue pressure of putting a timeline on when she is eventually going to break the long-standing record.

"I have never really looked at the record that way, never really burdened myself by putting a date on when I think I am going to break it. I know I am in good hands, I just follow the instructions he gives and the rest follows. If I think too much of a mark, I may get the basics wrong and I want to avoid that."

A lot of the credit goes to coach Robert Bobby George, who is an ardent believer in the role biomechanics plays in the development of an athlete and prefers to educate his athletes about its importance while giving the least importance to records and numbers.

"I have never been a fan of numbers as the way of quantifying an athlete's performance," said Bobby. "For someone as young as Shaili, it's important to develop her the right way and to educate her on how muscles of her body are in use when she performs. If I dump all that and focus only on breaking a certain record, then I am being short-sighted and not preparing my athletes for the years to come."

However, numbers are unavoidable in athletics, especially in an event like the long jump at the Asian Games 2023, where Shaili Singh will be up for a stiff challenge against Asian Champion Sumire Hata, who raised the bar too high in Asia with a jump of 6.97m.

Shaili Singh witnessed the jump by Hata at the Asian Athletics Championships, where the Indian settled for the silver medal with an attempt of 6.54m. It wasn't just a fluke jump by the Japanese, who also recorded a 6.74m at the same event before going big.

Sumire Hata, however, hasn't crossed the 6.50m mark since the event and could point at the Japanese being past her season peak. However, Shaili is not taking anything for granted for the showdown in Hangzhou and is looking forward to the challenge.

"I am not thinking about it, all I am thinking about is my performance," said Shaili after the Asian Championships. "When she jumped 6.97m, I thought if she can then I can do it too. I am looking forward to competing with somebody like her again because, on the world stage, the competition gets tougher, and setting a high competitive level in Asia will only help me get better."

There's no dearth of competition at the Asiad with India's No. 2 Ancy Sojan also in the fray while a couple of Chinese jumpers (Shiqi Xiong and Jiawei Zhong) will lay their claims in front of the home crowd.

The Chinese crowd, in fact, has poured in numbers to watch the multi-sporting extravaganza while the first two days of the athletics event have seen a nearly full house, creating a dream atmosphere for Shaili Singh, who loves to perform with the crowd behind her.

This was evident during a strong fan turnaround at the prestigious Seiko Grand Prix in Yokohama in May when Shaili Singh recorded a strong 6.65m jump, her best on foreign soil. Her effort helped her finish ahead of her Japanese rival Hata and bag the bronze medal at the World Athletics Continental Tour category event.

"It's (fans turnaround) something I am looking forward to. I always love to feed off the energy of the crowd. It always encourages me to push myself harder and gets the best out of me," concluded Shaili Singh.