PR Sreejesh announced that his fourth Olympics will be the last act of his storied career.
PR Sreejesh’s career around the time that the Indian men’s hockey team, and indeed the sport of hockey itself in the country, had seemingly met its demise. Obituaries were being written for the Indian hockey team, winners of eight gold medals, six of which came on the trot, when they failed to make it to the Beijing Olympics. From amid the rubble of that failure began an often rocky journey for the men’s team that culminated in them winning their first Olympic medal since 1980 in Tokyo in 2021.
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Sreejesh was with the Indian team throughout that journey. Rarely has one player’s career been an outline for an important period in a team’s history but that is the case with the 36-year-old goalkeeper, who announced that he will retire after the 2024 Paris Olympics. Here, we take a look at the three Olympics that Sreejesh has taken part in thus far and how he and the Indian team fared in those.
London 2012: Having made his debut for the senior national team in 2006, Sreejesh became a first team regular around 2010. His Olympic debut came at London 2012, but this turned out to be another disappointing chapter in the history of Indian hockey rather than a remarkable turnaround from not qualifying in 2008. India lost all of their group stage matches and finished with 11 goals for and 22 against. They then lost to South Africa in the match for eleventh place and thus finished bottom of the pile.
