With his 26th-place result at the 2024 ILCA World Championship in Adelaide, Australia on Tuesday, 30 January, Vishnu Saravanan has secured India's first quota spot for the 2024 Paris Olympics in sailing.
After ten races, Vishnu was ranked fifth in the Olympic quota rankings and secured a spot in the Paris Olympics 2024. There were seven quotas available for the ILCA World Championship 2024 in Adelaide for countries which had not qualified for the Olympics earlier.
Having placed in the top 10 and advanced to the gold event, the 24-year-old sailor was assured of an Olympic quota.
"Vishnu Saravanan has secured India's 1st #ParisOlympics quota in Sailing at the ILCA 7 World Championship, held in Adelaide.
"Clinching one of the 7 Olympic quotas available at the event, #TOPScheme Athlete Vishnu outsailed many Asian sailors to finish 26th overall and secure the Paris berth," Sports Authority of India shared the post on X.
Vishnu finished with a respectable score of 174 in the ILCA Championship 2024. Remarkably, the young sailor took home the bronze in the same competition at the Hangzhou Asian Games the previous year. He has also represented India at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, however, he couldn’t bring home a medal.
In the 2023 World Sailing Championships held last year, he narrowly missed securing a spot for the Paris Olympics. Finishing 23rd in the overall race standings, he fell just seven places short of obtaining one of the 16 Paris quota places available.
The other six quotas on offer at the Adelaide meet went to Guatemala, Montenegro, Chile, Denmark, Turkey and Sweden.
With inputs from IANS.
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