Opportunity missed: Sathiyan-Manika's mixed fortunes see their Paris hopes up in smoke
The duo crashed out in the quarter-finals of their knockouts group at the World Mixed Doubles Olympic Qualification in Havirov on Friday
When Manika Batra teamed up with G Sathiyan soon after the Tokyo Olympics three years ago where she played mixed doubles with Sharath Kamal, they had the 2024 Paris Games in mind. The 2018 Commonwealth Games bronze-winning combination sought to build into something substantial going into Paris, and the early signs only backed the promise.
Until it tailed off at the business end, leaving their Paris mixed doubles goals up in smoke.
Manika and Sathiyan crashed out in the quarter-finals of their knockouts group at the World Mixed Doubles Olympic Qualification in Havirov on Friday, matching Thursday's outcome in a tournament that offered four Paris quotas to the winning pairs from the four groups. The format of this event featuring 26 teams offered little room for error, and Sathiyan-Manika lost two of their three matches across the two days. After receiving a bye on Friday, they went down to Malaysians Javen Choong and Karen Lyne 1-4 (9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 11-7, 8-11).
There are still six quotas to fill through the world rankings, but with all the top-ranked pairs skipping this event, the mixed doubles door for the 18th-ranked Indians is all but shut. India have secured historic team quotas in both men and women — and thereby in singles events too — but, given that Sathiyan and even Sharath earlier had maintained that the 16-team mixed doubles was India’s most realistic shot at a TT medal at the Olympics, this would feel like a big opportunity missed.
“Definitely a big opportunity missed. It'll take some time to overcome it and get past this," Sathiyan said from Havirov. “We were actually looking at mixed seriously; I felt it was one of our best bets to win a medal at the Olympics. We had reached the world No. 5 (in the rankings), beat a lot of the top pairs. It's hard to digest, especially the last few months where we started to have some bad losses.”
This time last year, Sathiyan and Manika were ranked fifth in the mixed doubles charts. The fall in rankings has mirrored their drop in form over the last few months.
In the four major WTT events they competed in as a pair this year (Doha Contender, Doha Star Contender, Goa Star Contender and Singapore Smash), they crashed out in the first round. Contrast this to the duo's WTT Budapest Contender title triumph in August 2021 — just after the Tokyo Games — and deep runs the following year in WTT tournaments, and the signs of optimism turning into concern were there.
They surfaced more glaringly in the couple of tournaments that the combo turned up for leading into the Olympic qualifiers. Playing the back-to-back Feeder events in Beirut last month, Manika and Sathiyan made the quarter-finals and final, only to be defeated by fellow Indian pairs in both. They were blanked 3-0 by Manav Thakkar and Archana Kamath in the first Feeder and, rather alarmingly, lost the final of the second to the more unheralded partnership of Akash Pal and Poymantee Baisya.
“We hit bad form in the wrong moment, I would say, just when the Olympic cycle started," Sathiyan said. “Probably from September last year... she had an ankle twist at the Asian (Table Tennis Championships), we had a tough loss at the Asian Games, then I went through a small injury (back spasms). And from there we had to come back. It was hard. When she was playing well, I wasn't and when I was playing well, she wasn't quite in rhythm. Both of us couldn't peak at the right time. We lost a lot of close matches in the last few months, which was tough.”
Even as Sathiyan managed to pick up his singles play just in time — he won the Beirut Feeder singles title — while Manika maintained her level in singles, together they ran out of time and confidence-instilling results to resurrect their mixed fortunes.
Not having a lot of training time as a pair would also have played a factor. Indian doubles players that have enjoyed some level of success in the recent past mostly train together; think Ayhika Mukherjee and Sutirtha Mukherjee, who are from the same academy. With Sathiyan based in Chennai and Manika in Hyderabad, they did not have that luxury. To their credit, the two did make an effort to blend their individual schedules in order to play more mixed doubles — Manika, for instance, turned up for the Feeder events while Sathiyan played some Contenders focused on mixed doubles — but it eventually couldn’t translate into an Olympics worthy brew.
Both Sathiyan and Manika are still likely to be in Paris for the other events. Not in the one they had targetted while teaming up post Tokyo, though, may well pinch.
“For now, our focus will shift to singles and team. Later, we will see what went wrong and how we should be looking forward from here (in mixed doubles). We will discuss that post the Olympics," Sathiyan said.
