Missed out on gold but still a golden success

Even though the Ruman Sana and Diya Siddique pair did not end up with the gold medal in the Recurve Mixed Doubles event of Archery World Cup (Stage-2), they brought the highest success in the history of Bangladesh archery despite suffering a 1-5 defeat to the pair from the Netherlands in the final at Lausanne, Switzerland yesterday.

The triumph of silver medal in Archery World Cup is a huge achievement for Bangladesh archery, which had earlier seen Ruman Sana secure bronze medal from the bigger stage of World Archery Championships two years ago in the Netherlands through which he made a direct entry to 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

With the absence of Asian top teams such South Korea, China, India, Chinese Taipei and Japan in the ongoing World Cup in Lausanne, Bangladesh stunned all to move into the recurve mixed doubles final after they underperformed in individual and other teams' events, after following a return to the international level by a more than 16 months gap due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Though almost everyone was dreaming of another upset in the final of the event, Ruman and Diya were in fact the underdogs to begin with compared to Netherlands' Sejf Van De Berth and Gabriela Schloesser, who are World ranked seventh in men section and 18th-ranked in women's section while Ruman is world's 13th-ranked archer and Diya is 325th-ranked archer repectively.

In the grand finale though, Ruman and Diya could not uplift their performance, only to make 30 points [7, 7, 8 and 8] out of 40 while the Dutch duo won the first set with a score of 36. Afterwards, Ruman and Diya did show enough resilience to draw the second set with an equal 35 points, but when Ruman and Diya needed to raise their game to even beyond their maximum potential to level the set points, they could only make 34 against Netherlands' 37 and thus had to surrender tenderly in the end.

 "I'm so happy with the achievement because being a newcomer at such a stage was hard for me. However, I think I tried my best and delivered," said Diya Siddique- thanking all coaches, teammates and team officials after the final in a video message.

Ruman Sana said: "We have made history to reach the final in an event of the Archery World Cup and we are very thankful to our sponsor City Group."

Before leaving for Lausanne, German coach Martin Fredrick was ecstatic to get a good recurve women's team for the first time and promising Diya was tremendously assisted by Ruman to reach the finals of such a big stage though Bangladesh previously bagged gold medals from comparatively small tournaments like Asian Grand Prix, ISSF Solidarity Archery Championships, South Asian Games and South Asian Archery Championships.