Mouma Das in the city on Tuesday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Calcutta: Mouma Das believes she is better prepared for her adventures at the Athens Olympic Games than many of her predecessors for other Games. The main reason for this, she said on Tuesday, were her many recent international experiences that made her confident of being able to give a fight.

It was a good point that the 20-year-old talked about. Poulami Ghatak went to the Sydney Games with a fine performance back home, but slipped rather badly in Australia. “That was because she did not have the benefit of enough international exposure immediately before the Games, said Mouma, a good friend of Poulami, the Commonwealth topper.

“I have been through three international meets lately — the world championship in Qatar (where we finished with gold in the second division), the SAF Games (where we got three golds), and the pre-Olympic meet (from where I qualified),” said Mouma.

The Class X Purba Kolkata Vidyalaya student will be missing her exams, but she is onto bigger things already. The main reason for her confidence has been the training under foreign coaches “especially Chinese coach Yin Wie.” “Not only did he do video analysis of our games and our strong and weak points, we were taught to analyse our own game,” said Mouma. “We were, for the first time, asked to keep a diary of our activity and our development. We were asked to think about our game when not in play, and we were also asked to read books.”

Mouma does not feel that Indian girls are in any way inferior to any of their Chinese or Korean counterparts. “I believe, and so does our coach, that physically we have made up the difference. I, for instance, need to improve on my service receiving and my forehand. I am working on this.”

Before leaving for Athens (on August 7), she will be under the training, for a while of national coach Kamlesh Mehta. “I will try and polish a few things there, in Delhi,” she said.

The basic fear that Mouma will have to overcome, though, is the big stage of the Olympic Games. “I have talked to Poulami about this, and I believe I have the determination to win. I think I can make it ahead of the group games and into the knockout stage, at least, if not a medal, a hope that I keep with me,” said Mouma, now ranked 165th in the world. “Much more will be clear when I get the final draw and know who I am playing.”

The new Asian junior champion Soumyajit Sarkar, who was also around at the Calcutta Sports Journalists’ Club press meet, talked on somewhat similar lines. He, too, does not believe Indians are any more in the red physically. The basics are okay, we need to prepare mentally, and we need to overcome our fears,” he said. “In the final, against my Korean opponent, I was trailing twice, but came back to win, simply because I believed I could beat him, and because I wanted to. I also did not let myself think I was playing a Korean. That helped.”

Sarkar felt much progress has been made by Indian paddlers in the last few years and results on the international stage say a lot on this. TTFI vice-president Prabir Mitra said the federation’s target was a world top-ten position for the country by 2010. “The results are coming through,” he said.