OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 2013-14 TOI is happy to announce its first Outstanding Achievement Award in Officiating and the 1st recipient of this award is none other than our beloved Abhishek Mukherjee of Kolkata. Raja as he is fondly called, has come a long way in this field of officiating in the last decade, coming over a lot of obstacles, where he went from a White Badge to Bronze as a Chair Umpire & then also passed the Silver Referee Badge School. Then started the journey to various Grand Slams, Olympics, Davis Cups, Asian Games, South East Asian Games and the icing on the cake came this year - 2014 - when he was selected for all 4 Grand Slams. He is only the 2nd Indian to achieve this feat and amongst only a handful of Asian Officials to have accomplished this. He was selected for his 1st Wimbledon Mens Singles Final as a line umpire this year after having done the finals at U.S.Open, Australian Open & the London 2012 Olympics. 2014 also was the 1st year he got assigned as Review Official (RO) for Doha ATP to start the year & followed it up with being the RO at the Australian Open. TOI has always had, acknowledging & showcasing the achievements in Officiating, as one its objectives and we have decided that Abhishek will be 1st recipient of this award for his conquests in the period 2013-14. We also gave an award of Rookie of the Year earlier to Ashay Shekatkar, who as a result got a chance to work 3 weeks in the Mens Futures in Bangkok. Abhishek this week is at the U.S.Open along with other 3 TOI musketeers - Shreeram Gokhale, Saibal Banerjee & Sagar Kashyap - who handed over the trophy to him in New York. We had already got the trophy done before their departure & Shreeram carried it with him to New York. Abhsihek knew nothing about this all along and it came as a surprise to him. Well done Abhishek. Congratulations....
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 08:51:23 +0000