Abhinav Bindra, India’s first individual Olympic gold medallist, on Thursday, said the road to the 2024 Paris Games will be difficult and “tricky” given the shorter three-year cycle. The former shooter said that normally athletes get a year after the Olympics to recover but this time things will be different.

“I see the next Olympics cycle will be tricky, primarily because of the shorter cycle. Normally athletes get a year post Olympics that allows them to rest and recover, but this time around they need to get back pretty quickly,” PTI quoted Bindra as saying.

Tokyo Olympics was postponed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Owing to this, the Olympics cycle was reduced to three years, from the usual four, going into the 2024 Paris Games.

The athletes will now be left with a challenge of having less qualification events and quotas.

In Tokyo, javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra handed the country only its second Olympics gold in individual events.

The celebrated shooter believes that bringing in scientific methods and creating a high-performance environment at the grassroots level will be critical going forward.

“We talk about top leaderships but I think we need to get more quality in the second-level of leadership. We need to empower these people with knowledge of how to set a high-performance environment,” the gold-medallist said.

“Incorporating science, technology, engineering, analytics and medicine to athletes’ training and development not just at elite level but basing it right at the grassroots level is important,” the 2008 Beijing Olympic champion added.

Apart from this, Bindra also lauded the country’s performance at the recently-concluded 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“It was a historic performance with the best-ever seven medals. There were moments of great triumph and heartbreaks, but that is what sport is all about. We have a good momentum now going forward,” Bindra added.