Santiago Nieva
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A profile
India Today , Boxing clever “India Today” 28/5/2018
He's put everything in our phones through WhatsApp. He won't let us forget," jokes senior boxer Manoj Kumar.
'He' is Santiago Nieva, the Indian boxing team coach, and he won't let boxers 'forget' their mistakes. There's no going slow, no stepping off the gas, and the results are showing.
India won three gold medals in boxing at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. One of them, almost inevitably, by M.C. Mary Kom in the women's 48 kg category. The other two went to the men, Gaurav Solanki (52 kg) and Vikas Krishan (75 kg).
With nine boxing medals overall, it was a fine performance, England won nine too, including six gold, to top the table. While the Commonwealth Games don't include majors like the US, Kazakhstan and Cuba, that tally is better than the seven medals, including three golds, that the Indian men won in Delhi in 2010, when men's boxing in India was at its peak. Much of that is down to Nieva, a 42-year-old Argentine who spent many years in Sweden, both as a boxer and a coach.
Gaurav Bidhuri, who became the third Indian man to win a medal, all bronzes, at the world championships in 2017, hails Nieva as 'innovative', while Krishan is all praise for Nieva's 'patience' and 'dedication'. That must be true, for the coach must live away from his family in Sweden, to where he flies back every few months.
In Patiala, where the national team is based, there are two training sessions six days a week, one in the morning and one in the evening, with "anything from planning to theory classes to preparing for upcoming competitions" in between. When he can, Nieva goes out for a meal or a cup of coffee. Even at his residence in the foreign coaches' quarters, much of the talk is about work. Breaks are about speaking to family or watching movies on the net. It can be taxing. "But I'm loving it," says Nieva.
"My main thing is strength training. The methods were old school. India needed to improve, use modern methods, complex exercises with free weights," he explains. "There are so many barriers, language, culture, but from day one, I felt well received by coaches and boxers and everybody. I can't complain."
The boxers, especially, have taken to him and embraced his methods.
Nieva came in to the picture at the end of a series of unfortunate incidents that had left Indian boxings in a shambles since the 2012 Olympic Games in London. "That was a very big setback for Indian boxers, from seven men in the 2012 Olympics to three in 2016. One bronze in 2012 and no woman in 2016," he says. Nieva says India is now back on track, noting that the men have won 13 medals in the first four months of the year. But more change is needed to make the next step up. "Too much bureaucracy makes it difficult to work smoothly sometimes. That we are trying to improve. The next step is to try to get facilities to be world class in India," Nieva said.
Those are things beyond his control, so Nieva has focused on the things he can influence right away, like modernising the strength-training regime and devoting more attention to the tactical side of boxing. One innovation: he has introduced video analysis to teach the boxers how to work their opponent into a position that gives them an advantage and how to read when to try to score and when to defend.
"It is no coincidence that some countries produce better boxers, or better coaches," said Nieva, a former national champion in the featherweight class in Sweden and Argentina, where the boxing culture is influenced by both Cuban amateur boxing and the American pros. "Not talent, the environment is the main thing, you have to create it. Or change it."
Even though under president Ajay Singh the Boxing Federation of India (BFI) hasn't been as bound by red tape as previous bodies, some of the realities of India's sporting scene have caught up. "Everyone wants results immediately," says Nieva. "It's not the best way to evaluate. You have to see the project work, the development, the methodology of coaching. I am not a magician?. In the end, results will come. But it will take time."
One of the things Nieva wants to do is spend more time with each boxer, analyse their shortcomings and strengths, make one boxer a world-beater if he can. It has happened, but not as much as he would like, and he is also worried about boxers turning professional, "I can't stop them".
Personable and professional, Nieva wants to make this gig work. It's certainly what Indian boxers deserve after the last few years. Is he the right man, then, to make India into a boxing powerhouse? Nieva says the "results will tell the story". So far, the tale has a happy beginning.
