By Karunesh Kumar

New Delhi [India], October 13 (ANI): Rajputana Royals (RR) won the inaugural Archery Premier League (APL) title on Sunday. India's ace archer and RR player, Ojas Pravin Deotale, after winning the tournament, felt that APL would be beneficial for Indian players, providing considerable stage experience similar to the Olympics.

He noted that competing against foreign players and the energetic crowd will help prepare Indian archers for the Olympics, giving them a valuable edge.

Ojas is the first Indian man to win an individual compound gold medal at the World Championships (2023), a multi-gold medalist at the Asian Games, and ranked among the world's best.

While speaking to ANI, Ojas Pravin said, 'It will be very beneficial for Indian players because it was such a big stage. It was such a big set-up. It has a different feeling, and we get the same feeling in the Olympics as well, because all the spectators cheer, and it is the same there as well. So, we are preparing for it and playing with foreign players is also a preparation, and it will be a plus point for us for the Olympics.'

The inaugural APL concluded on Sunday with a final between the Rajputana Royals and the Prithviraj Yodhas, in which the Royals held their nerves in a shootoff to be crowned the APL champions.

Olympian Ankita Bhakat, a recurve specialist from West Bengal, Olympian (Paris 2024), 2022 Asian Games bronze medalist (team), expresses her excitement about playing alongside international archers in the APL, appreciating the opportunity to practice with them.

'It is a huge thing that we got the opportunity to play with international archers. We are very happy. The international archer players used to practice with us, and they stayed with us all the time. It did not feel that they were from some other country,' Ankita Bhakat told ANI.

Coming to the match, it was boiled down to a hit-and-miss match in the tiebreaking shootoff, where the two most consistent Royals' compound archers - Ojas Deotale and Ella Gibson - hit the target, while none of the four Yodhas' players found the yellow dot.

But the Yodhas can hold their heads high, not just for giving Royals a tough fight but also for becoming the first APL team to register a perfect rotation of eight arrows in a set, scoring a perfect 80 with all 10.

But still it didn't turn out to be enough despite taking a 4-2 lead, headed by their in-form senior compound archer, Abhishek Verma, who teamed up with Matias Grande, Gatha Khadake and Andrea Becerra.

For the Royals, recurvers Mete Gazoz and Ankita Bhakat partnered with Gibson and Deotale to help their team lift the trophy, having lost just once in 12 matches on their way to winning the title.

The drama started in the first set itself, which ended with one of Khadake's arrows getting upgraded by the judges to give the Yodhas a 78-77 win in the first set.

However, the Royals roared back in the next with a 78-75 margin to square the final at 2-2. The third set saw the Yodhas' archers scripting history by scoring 10s on all eight arrows to win it with an unprecedented scoreline of 80-77.

The match went on a knife-edge towards the end of the fourth set, when Grande needed a 9 to seal the championship for the Yodhas, but he hit an 8 and the Royals won the set 78-77 to make it 4-4, with a shootoff to decide the winner. And Gibson and Deotale did the rest by hitting the shootoff target twice. (ANI)