Ojas Pravin Deotale

Some Lesser Known Facts About Ojas Pravin Deotale

• When he was a kid, he used to open the brooms in his house and use them as a bow and arrow because of which his mother had to buy new brooms every few days.

• He used to do rollerskating before practising archery. He even won medals at the Maharashtra state level.

• When Ojas was young, he had a serious health issue, and their family doctor suggested that they shouldn’t stress him out. Ojas coped well and took good care of himself while growing up.

• When he was 13 years old, in 2015, he learned about archery at a summer camp.

  

• His parents saw his interest in archery and enrolled him to an archery academy in Trimurti Nagar in Nagpur. There, he was trained by Satyajeet Yelne. He started practising with the Indian bow before shifting to recurve.

• He had to change the academy because the Trimurti Nagar academy lacked a target buttress. He enrolled at the A-ZEE Sports Academy under the NIS Coach Mohammad Zeeshan Rafique where he trained for 5 to 6 years. While he was there, he got to know about compound archery. He started practising it and became the first player to get a national-level medal in Uttarakhand.

• Later, the A-ZEE sports shop invested in Ojas’s equipment because his parents could not afford it at that time.

• His parents said Rs. 90,000 was a lot of money to buy his equipment and they would prefer to put it into a business where it could be used more effectively. But his uncle backed him up and told him not to worry. In an interview, he said,
  

  My uncle gave me Rs 90,000. It was a turning point in my nascent sporting career. Many talented players quit sports as they don’t get timely support. I must consider myself lucky.”

• He once stayed at his coach’s home for more than a year where his coach trained him for free.

• During that time, he stayed at his school, Siddhivinayak School for four months and used to practice on a target buttress which his father had installed for him in school.

• While staying at the Siddhivinayak School, he used to start training at 5 a.m. with yoga and meditation. He used to eat food that a school worker named Chaya Rakshak brought from his home.

• When the second lockdown in 2021 was imposed, Ojas rented a room near the Tajbagh Academy. He later shifted to his school and stayed alone there.

• In July 2022, he moved to Satara. There, he joined the Drushti Archery Academy and started training under the coach Pravin Sawant.

• In 2022, in the Indian Archery Junior team selection held in Sonipat, he scored 1,423 and 1,427 out of 1,440. He also broke the Junior World Record of 1419 set by Mike Schloesser in 2014.

• He had an accident in Pune before his senior debut. In the accident, he fractured his leg, however; he passed the fitness test for Sharjah 2022 Asia Cup, despite the fracture.

• On 5 August 2023, he became the first Indian male archer to win the gold medal in the men’s compound event at the 2023 World Archery Championships in Berlin.

• In the tournament, he won against Poland’s Przemyslaw Konecki with a score of 148-144 in the quarterfinals. He beat the former world champion, Dutch archer Mike Schloesser, in the semifinals. In the finals, Deotale achieved a perfect score of 150, defeating Poland’s Lukasz Przybylski by 150-149.

• In 2023, he was ranked at number 9 archer in the world.

• According to his father, Ojas had no friends, wasn’t interested in watching TV, and didn’t use social media much. He wanted to stay focused on his goal of winning a medal for India.

• In his free time, he reads the autobiography of Abdul Kalam and Sachin Tendulkar.

• He is an avid dog lover and has a pet dog named Simba.