SRIKANT: Lone Laser Class entry for Pusan

Calcutta: When 21-year-old sailor Sandeep Srikant reached Marseilles in June this year, to train under Robert Scheidt of Brazil, it was one of many high points of an upwind voyage that started six years ago in the southern suburbs of Chennai.

Training under Scheidt, a world-renowned exponent of Laser Class sailing, who has won gold in two successive Olympics and is a five-time world champion, honed Srikant’s skills and helped him make it to the Indian sailing team for the Pusan Asian Games.

Srikant, incidentally, is the only Laser Class entry in the team. None of the other participating classes — Laser Radial, Enterprise, 420 and 470 — is recognised at the Olympic level.

The second-year B.Com student is quite aware of the high expectations people have from him. “Being the only Indian in the Laser Class, I know I will be under a lot of attention and will give off my best,” Srikant, passing through the city, told The Telegraph.

In a sport that is still pretty much the preserve of the Services and has not really caught the public imagination,

Srikant’s decision to choose a difficult class is all the more laudable.

The son of a merchant navy officer, affinity for the water came almost naturally for the 6’ 8” Srikant. A keen swimmer, he decided to chart a different course for himself when he first took to sailing in 1996. Since then, the call of the choppy blue waters has been difficult to resist.

Before his latest triumph, in the recently-concluded Laser Nationals in Hyderabad where he finished first, he finished fifth in the Asia Pacific meet in Thailand. He was national champion in 2000 too.

Srikant, who has finished the first stage of the training camp for Pusan, is headed back home for a well-deserved rest before the final camp starts on September 1. The budding sailor conceded that the development of the sport in the country is hamstrung by both its inherent expensive nature and the lack of adequate government support.

“The government does send us abroad once a year, but that short stint is not enough for adequate training.”

Though Srikant has trained largely in India, his tie-up with sports promotion agency, Cutty Sark, has helped him go overseas for advanced training. Before his 45-day stint in Marseilles, Srikant trained in Plymouth in the UK for a month.