Olympic contenders: Dhiraj Bommadevara | Les Huit à Paris 2024

This article series, Les Huit à Paris, spotlights eight of the biggest contenders for the individual titles at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

India’s history at the Olympic Games goes back more than a century – but it’s fair to say success hasn’t been a huge part of that journey.

It’s a country of 1.4 billion people that only won an individual Olympic gold medal for the first time in 2008. 

Medal expectations are increasing – along with audiences – and a hero’s welcome awaits any athlete who returns home with something shiny around their neck. It’s time for a new Indian superstar to emerge.

For many years, Indian archery’s headline medal hopes at an Olympic Games have rested uneasily on the shoulders of Deepika Kumari and the women’s team. 

Now a new, hungry young leader has emerged to lead this team to… something big?

Quick stats

• Name: Dhiraj Bommadevara, India
• Age: 22
• World ranking: 12
• Olympic caps: 0
• Instagram: @dhiraj_bommadevara

Why it could happen

The world of Indian archery has been a bumpy road in the last decade, but in 2024, it’s a cornerstone of the country’s Olympic effort, alongside a world-beating compound team.

For the first time since London 2012, India has a full squad at the Games.

Four-time Olympian Tarundeep Rai and Tokyo Olympian Pravin Jadhav will be joined by Bommadevara, who has emerged in the last cycle as the most consistent and winningest recurve man on the squad. Dhiraj has been producing international results since 2017, but in the last six months, he’s shown the results that could put him – or his team – in the frame for a medal in Paris.

Bommadavera, Rai and Jadhav combined to beat Korea to gold in Shanghai, collecting India’s first win in the category for 14 years.

“It’s amazing,” said 22-year-old Dhiraj, who also showed promise in the individual matches. “It’s our team bonding and hard work that was the key here.”

The pressure on Indian archers is monumental.

But time and time again, Bommadevara’s level-headedness shines through. 

It‘s this – and only this – that will deliver India’s first archery medal at the Olympics.

Why it might not happen

The pressure on the Indian team, and the Indian press – notoriously tough on athletes – will be ratcheted up ever further. Can Dhiraj handle it? Maybe.

There have been some missteps. At last year’s Asian Games, Dhiraj had made the last eight individually, but somehow shot no less than two outright misses in his match against Ilfat Abdullin of Kazakhstan, eventually going out in a tiebreak. His timing, apparently, completely broke down.

Somehow he managed to recover to lead the men’s team to a silver medal, at least showing the sort of champion quality in adversity needed to reach the very top.

As he told Cosmopolitan last month: “For me, it is passion. Every single day since I have been playing, I have only loved it more. We have our daily training sessions from Monday to Saturday. But even on Sundays, after I get my rest, I just want to go and shoot a few arrows.”

“What is the first thing I do when I win? Restart.”

Did you know?

Bommadevara became fascinated by archery as a five-year-old listening to the epic tales of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, both of which feature archery. 

The Arjuna Award, a major honour given to Indian Olympic athletes and para-athletes, is named after a mythological archer hero in the Mahabharata – with a statuette of Arjuna going to the winner. Previous winners include Deepika Kumari, Atanu Das, and Jyothi Surekha Vennam. 

Bommadevara’s parents might be the true heroes. They pawned the family jewels to send him to the world youth championships in 2021. Dhiraj’s career took only off after his results there.