Vishnu Saravanan Clinches India's First Paris 2024 Sailing Quota

Vishnu Saravanan, an Indian sailor, clinched India's inaugural sailing quota for the Paris 2024 Olympics at the ILCA World Championship 2024 held in Adelaide, Australia. In the one-person dinghy event at the Adelaide Sailing Club, Saravanan gathered 125 net points during the six-day competition, securing the 26th position on the overall leaderboard. Significantly, he secured the fifth spot among eligible sailors, guaranteeing a quota place for the Paris Olympics.

"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.

In the 2023 World Sailing Championships held last year, Saravanan 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 ILCA 7 Men's World Championship served as a qualifying event for Paris 2024 with seven quotas on offer for countries that had not qualified for the Olympics earlier.

The remaining six quotas at the Adelaide competition were secured by Guatemala, Montenegro, Chile, Denmark, Turkey, and Sweden. Vishnu Saravanan, a 24-year-old Indian sailor, had previously won a bronze medal in the same sailing category at the Asian Games in Hangzhou last year. Saravanan, a bronze medallist at the U21 World Championships in 2019, represented India at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, finishing 20th out of 35 participants. In the sailing category at the Tokyo Olympics, India was represented by four athletes: Varun Thakkar, Nethra Kumanan, Saravanan K.C. Ganapathy, and Vishnu Saravanan himself.