Deepika Kumari- Archery

Deepika Kumari- Archery

 born 13 June 1994 is an Indian athlete who competes in the event of Archery, is currently ranked World No. 5, and is a former world number one. She won a gold medal in the 2010 Commonwealth games in the women's individual recurve event. She also won a gold medal in the same competition in the women's team recurve event along with Dola Banerjee andBombayala Devi.

Kumari qualified for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, where she competed in the Women's Individual and Women's teamevents, finishing in eighth place in the latter.

She was conferred the Arjuna Award, India's second highest sporting award in the year 2012 by President of India Pranab Mukherjee. In February 2014, she was honored with FICCI Sportsperson of the Year Award. The Government of India awarded her the civilian honour of the Padma Shri in 2016.

Achievements

Deepika become the second Indian to win the title after Palton Hansda won the junior compound competition at the 2006 Archery World Cup in Mérida, Mexico.

She won the 11th Youth World Archery Championship held in Ogden, USA in 2009, at the age of fifteen. She also won a gold medal in the same competition in the women's team recurve event, alongside Dola Banerjee and Bombayala Devi.

At the Delhi Commonwealth games 2010, Deepika won two gold medals, one in the individual event and the other in the women's team recurve event. For this, she was honoured with the Outstanding Performance at CWG (Female) Award at the 2010 Sahara Sports Awards ceremony.

Later at the Asian Games of 2010, held in Guangzhou, China, Deepika missed out on a medal after she lost to Kwon Un Sil of North Korea in the bronze-medal play-off of the women's individual archery event. But as a part of the Indian archery recurve team, along with Rimil Buriuly and Dola Banerjee, Deepika edged out Chinese Taipei 218–217 in the bronze play-off to ensure a podium finish at the Aoti Archery Range.

During the Jharkhand Day celebrations, the government of Jharkhand issued full page photos in leading local newspapers with Deepika showing off her gold medals along with India's cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who also hails from Ranchi.

In May 2012, Deepika Kumari won her first World Cup individual stage recurve gold medal at Antalya, Turkey. She beat Korea's Lee Sung-Jin by six set points to four in the final.^[13] Later in 2012, she would go on to become world no. 1 in Women's Recurve Archery. In London Olympics 2012, Deepika Kumari lost against Amy Oliver of Great Britain in the opening round, attributing a relatively poor performance to fever and high winds.

On 22 July 2013, she won the Gold Medal in Archery World Cup stage 3 held at Medellin, Colombia where India finished fourth. On 22 September 2013, Deepika lost 4-6 toYun Ok-Hee of South Korea & settled for Silver Medal in 2013 FITA Archery World Cup. This was her 3rd Silver medal in as many appearances in the World Cup Final.

In 2014, Deepika was featured by Forbes (India) as one of their '30 under 30'. However, she failed to make the Indian team for 2014 after finishing outside the top 4 at the national qualifications.

In 2015, Deepika's first medal came at the second stage of the Archery World Cup, where she won a bronze in the individual event. At the World Championships in Copenhagen, she won a team silver along with Laxmirani Majhi and Rimil Buriuly, after narrowly losing out on a gold in a match against Russia which they conceded 4-5 in a shoot-off. In the latter half of this year, she won the Silver Medal in the 2015 Archery World Cup final. In November, 2015, she won Bronze medal in the 2015 Asian Archery Championships withJayanta Talukdar in the Recurve Mixed Team event.