India female gymnast Pranati Nayak and swimmers Maana Patel and Srihari Natraj have begun their training ahead of their debut at the Olympics.
The official Twitter handle of the Sports Authority of India (SAI) posted pictures of the duo gearing up for training and captioned the post as: "Destination Tokyo Here are Swimmers @srihari3529 and Maana Patel at the #Tokyo2020 Games village, getting ready for their first training session. Watch Team India in action at @Tokyo2020 starting from 23 July. Come, let's #Cheer4India."
Minutes later, SAI Media tweeted, "Destination Tokyo Take a look at Gymnast Pranati Nayak at the training arena in #Tokyo2020 Games village. Don't forget to support Team India with #Cheer4India."
Earlier, shuttlers PV Sindhu and Sai Praneeth hit the court running on Monday and they trained alongside coach Park Tae Sang. Paddlers Sharath Kamal and Sathiyan Gnanasekaran also started their training and they were seen battling it out on the table tennis court.
Indian archers Atanu Das, Tarundeep Rai, Praveen Jadhav, and Deepika Kumari also kickstarted their training on Monday.
The Indian contingent that departed for Tokyo from New Delhi on Saturday, after an official send-off at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, safely reached Tokyo and checked into the Olympics Games Village. All 88 athletes underwent Covid-19 testing at the airport and were found to be negative. Their PVC cards were also validated at the airport.
A total of 127 athletes across 18 sports disciplines from India will be competing in Tokyo. This is the biggest-ever contingent India is sending to any Olympics. The 69 cumulative events across the 18 sport disciplines that India will participate in are also the highest ever for the country.
Tokyo Olympics will run from July 23 to August 8. The mega event was slated to be held last year, but it had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
( With inputs from ANI )
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor