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Podcast Episode

E184 | The Champion Builder | Sanjeeva Singh

Inspire Someone Today··14 September 2026·52 min

About this episode

Send us Fan Mail Episode 184 — The Champion Builder ft. Sanjeeva Singh He learned archery by watching. As a schoolboy volunteering at the 1982 Asian Games, Sanjeeva Singh had never held a bow — he spent his days fetching targets and water for the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese archers training on the field he was assigned to. He watched. He applied his Class 11 physics to what he saw. Within two years he was a national junior champion.That same instinct — watch closely, apply what you know, teach yourself if nobody will teach you — took him to the 1988 Olympics as an archer, and later built the Tata Archery Academy from nothing in a Jharkhand tribal belt nobody expected to produce a world champion. It's the same instinct now building India's first rural integrated archery academy, from the ground up, in a village in Deoria, Uttar Pradesh.In this conversation: the myth that you can't be a serious athlete and a serious student at the same time (he was both, at once); the "ruthless" standard he holds his trainees to and where the line sits before it tips into harm; his own framework for what it takes to build a champion mindset — four Ps, four Ds, and willpower; and why, at nearly 60, he chose to build his most ambitious project yet in a place with no sporting infrastructure at all.Have you purchased the copy of Inspire Someone Today, yet? - Give it a go geni.us/istbookAvailable on all podcast platforms, including, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify