India's men's hockey team broke a 12-year Olympics jinx by winning their opening group league encounter, but tennis star Leander Paes's dream of a second medal in the Games history went up in smoke after he and doubles partner Rohan Bopanna crashed out in round one, here today.
The day commenced promisingly when army rower Dattu Baban Bhokanal entered the quarterfinals in men's single sculls by finishing third in his heat.
Elsewhere women shooters Ayonika Paul and Apurvi Chandela put up a flop show to crash out of the 10m air rifle final while paddlers Mouma Das and Manika Batra also made an early exit by losing their preliminary round encounters.
In men's hockey it was drag-flick experts Rupinder Pal Singh (2 goals) and V R Raghunath (1) who saved the day for India against minnows Ireland to break the poor sequence of opening game losses in Olympics going back to Athens in 2004.
Raghunath (15th minute) and Rupinder (27th, 49th) converted three out of seven penalty corners India earned in the match to secure their first win in an opening clash at the Olympics since Sydney Games 2000.
Ireland gave India a run for their money, especially in the second half, finding the net twice through Jermyn John (45th) and Conor Harte (56th) at the Olympic Hockey Centre.
Even as the hockey men were engaged in a tough battle, the Indian tennis pair of Paes and Bopanna, not the best of friends by any stretch of imagination, were outclassed by their Polish rivals Marcin Matkowski and Lukasz Kubot 4-6 6-7 (6-8).
Playing in his record seventh and probably his last Olympics, Paes - a bronze medallist at the 1996 Atlanta Games, saw his campaign get over in only 84 minutes as not for once did the Indian pair look like having forged a winning combination.
The controversies leading upto the first round match also did not do any good to the pair as there was a distinct lack of on-court chemistry between them.
Ironically, at 43 Paes has possibly played his last Olympic match and too bad that it ended in whimper within two days of his arrival in the Brazilian city despite the bang that it created due to the off-court events in the lead up to the quadrennial extravaganza.
Questions being raised about Paes' delay in joining the squad after playing World Team Tennis and subsequent reports of not getting a bed in the earmarked apartment in the Games Village only made the matters worse.
The day's proceedings started on a promising note when 25-year-old Pune-based armyman Bhokanal ended up third in the first heat of the day by finishing the 2000m race in 7 minutes and 21.67 seconds behind Angel Fournier Rodriguez of Cuba (7:06.89) and Mexico's Juan Carlos Cabrera (7:08.27).
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Bhokanal, who had qualified for the Games with a silver medal finish in the Asia-Oceania qualifier, was in second place for the first 500 metres of the race but started to lag behind once the Mexican in lane 2 picked up the pace around the 700 metres mark.
The well built Cuban and the Mexican then increased their lead from the rest but Bhokanal maintained his third position although he was more than 13 seconds behind the second placed Cabrera.
Even as there was some rejoicing in the Indian camp over the army rower's performance, there were setbacks from the shooting range, which provided the country with two medals in the 2012 London Games, with the elimination of the two women shooters.
Chandela shot an overall 411.6 to finish 34th out 51 competitors while Paul finished further down in 47th place with a total score of 403 in the 10m air rifle event in which China's Li Du set a new Olympic record of 420.7 to top the qualification stage.
The expectations for a better show from the Indian duo of Chandela and Paul, who had won the gold and silver in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, were dashed as they were found wanting in a top-class field.
23-year-old Chandela had secured an Olympic berth for her country by finishing third in the 10m Air Rifle in the 2015 ISSF World Cup in Changwon, Korea. Later in the year, Chandela had won silver in the World Cup Final held in Munich.
Paul, who is also 23, had won an Olympic quota for India with a silver in the Asian Olympic Qualifying Competition in January.
Later Mouma and national champion Manika made their exit after losing their preliminary round singles matches to higher-ranked rivals in the table tennis competition.
World no 150 Mouma's challenge was lukewarm and short-lived as the Indian veteran, in her second Olympics, lost to world No 58 Daniela Dodean Monteiro of Romania 2-11, 7-11, 7-11, 3-11.
Debutant Manika, on the other hand, put up a good fight before going down to her 60th-ranked Polish rival Katarzyna Franc-Grzybowska 2-4 (12-10 6-11 12-14 11-8 4-11 12-14) in 48 minutes in another preliminary round clash.
In the men's singles, Achanta Sharath Kamal and Soumyajit Ghosh will play their first round matches later in the day.
It is the first time that four Indian paddlers had qualified for the Summer Games.
