When Manika Batra teamed up with G Sathiyan soon after the Tokyo Olympics three years ago where she had played mixed doubles with Sharath Kamal, they had the 2024 Paris Games in mind. The 2018 Commonwealth Games bronze-winning combination sought to build into something substantial going into Paris, and the early signs only backed the promise.

Until it tailed off at the business end, leaving their Paris mixed doubles goals up in smoke.

Manika and Sathiyan crashed out in the quarter-finals of their knockouts group at the World Mixed Doubles Olympic Qualification in Havirov on Friday, matching Thursday's outcome in a tournament that offered four Paris quotas to the winning pairs from the four groups. The format of this event featuring 26 teams offered little room for error, and Sathiyan-Manika lost two of their three matches across the two days. After receiving a bye on Friday, they went down to Malaysians Javen Choong and Karen Lyne 1-4 (9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 11-7, 8-11).

There are still six quotas to fill through the world rankings, but with all the top-ranked pairs skipping this event, the mixed doubles door for the 18th-ranked Indians is all but shut. India have secured historic team quotas in both men and women — and thereby in singles events too — but, given that Sathiyan and even Sharath earlier had maintained that the 16-team mixed doubles was India’s most realistic shot at a TT medal at the Olympics, this would feel like a big opportunity missed.

Especially since this time last year, Sathiyan and Manika were ranked fifth in the mixed doubles charts. The fall in rankings has mirrored their drop in form over the last few months.

In the four major WTT events they competed in as a pair this year (Doha Contender, Doha Star Contender, Goa Star Contender and Singapore Smash), they failed to progress beyond the first round. Contrast this to the duo's WTT Budapest Contender title triumph in August 2021 — just after the Tokyo Games — and deep runs the following year in WTT tournaments, and the signs of optimism turning into concern were there.

They surfaced more glaringly in the couple of tournaments that the combo turned up for leading into the Olympic qualifiers. Playing the back-to-back Feeder events in Beirut last month, Manika and Sathiyan made the quarter-finals and final, only to be defeated by fellow Indian pairs in both. They were blanked 3-0 by Manav Thakkar and Archana Kamath in the first Feeder and, rather alarmingly, lost the final of the second to the more unheralded partnership of Akash Pal and Poymantee Baisya.

“Mixed hasn't gone well in the last few months," Sathiyan said in a chat before the start of the second Feeder event. “Both of us had injuries and little dips in form at different points. We couldn't get that A game together on the day.”

Manika dealt with a minor ankle issue months before last year's Asian Games, where the pair suffered a Round of 16 exit. Sathiyan's drop in form last year and back injury during the Nationals last December also had a telling effect on the pair's outcomes this year. Even as Sathiyan managed to pick up his singles play just in time — he won the Beirut Feeder singles title — while Manika maintained her level in singles, together they ran out of time and confidence-instilling results to resurrect their mixed fortunes.

Not having a lot of training time as a pair would also have played a factor. Indian doubles players that have enjoyed some level of success in the recent past mostly train together; think Ayhika Mukherjee and Sutirtha Mukherjee, who are from the same academy. With Sathiyan based in Chennai and Manika in Hyderabad, they did not have that luxury.

To their credit, the two did make an effort to blend their individual schedules in order to play more mixed doubles — Manika, for instance, turned up for the Feeder events while Sathiyan played some Contenders focused on mixed doubles — but it eventually couldn’t translate into an Olympics worthy brew.

Both Sathiyan and Manika are still likely to be in Paris for the other events. Not in the one they had targetted while teaming up post Tokyo, though, may well pinch.

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