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A free soul who conquered his sport

Hari Chand sits at Café Coffee Day, a stone’s throw away from the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi.

A free soul who conquered his sport


Sundeep Misra

Hari Chand sits at Café Coffee Day, a stone’s throw away from the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi. Inside the enormous belly of the stadium is a tartan track. Hari Chand has an unrealised dream there. If fulfilled, it would have made him the undisputed long-distance running champion in India. For a lot of people, who have bothered to track his career, he is still the undisputed long-distance champion. In the creased chapters of the Indian athletic history, he is without a doubt, a legend.

Hari Chand needs tea. “It gives relief to the heart,” he says, with a goofy smile that is endearing. He is short, micro-inches shorter than 5’2”. Clad in a pair of white trousers, white shirt, black felt shoes and a blazer dating back to 1975 when he won the Arjuna Award. It’s a 40-year-old blazer with dust that smells of a glorious past; a rich athletic history that most in a nation occupied by smartphones, T20 cricket, intolerance, 100-crore films and perceived communal tussles have simply forgotten. “Yaadein pashmina shawl ki tarah hoti hain,” he says. You wait for the punch line. “Uski taap mein aap sukun ki neend so sakte hain.”

The tea has arrived. It’s the typical modern café tea, and for Hari Chand, it’s downright sinful that in today’s world, hot water, tea bag and a tiny pitcher of milk constitutes tea. He keeps looking at it.

“The best tea was in my village in Ghorewaha. It kept simmering to blend in with milk, tea leaves and gave off an aroma that could awaken a dead man,” he says with a smile that reminds you of an era where a good cup of tea might have solved global issues. Hari Chand’s village Ghorewaha is in Hoshiarpur district.

Hari Chand’s father Jaggu Ram wanted his eldest son to be a wrestler. “Those were the days of the akharas so I guess, he was influenced,” Hari Chand says. For some reason, he used to run fast; and for long periods of time. In the village, he never walked. “I had to reach early and I noticed that I never got tired,” he says. What perplexed him about himself became a passion. Hari Chand was competing at the school and district levels, and suddenly was pitch-forked on the national stage when he won the School Nationals in 1970 running the 1500 m. Then followed the Junior Nationals in Kottyam where he won the 3000 m. Coaches noticed his talent and also that at the end of the run, he was never tired.

The Central Reserve Police Force offered a job as a head constable and he accepted. “The job was important but it was also a good running unit,” explains Hari. He won the gold in the 10,000 m at the All-India Police Meet in Jaipur and then was second to Shivnath Singh, another long-distance legend in the Inter-State in Jaipur. In the Open Nationals in Madurai, he was again second to Shivnath.

Jagmohan Singh, a coach, then was already seeing Hari Chand’s talent and ensured that the CRPF man found himself on his first-ever international flight to Seoul in 1975 for the Asian Track and Field Championships. It was there that he found his momentum picking up the gold in the 10,000m with a timing of 29:12. Shivnath Singh was beaten into second place.

The CCD’s tea hasn’t gone down well with Hari Chand. He makes a face but says in the given circumstances it would do. At the age of 65, he has two stents, lives with his wife Sheetal Kaur, who calls four times to check on him, in a rented house in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar. He has two sons and a daughter. The sons have their own homes while his daughter is married. Hari Chand retired as second-in-command in the CRPF. “Yes, I did have my own house,” he explains. “But I sold it to marry my daughter and gave the rest of the money to my sons to start their lives.”

There is a silence that stretches a bit before he smiles and says, “I wanted it that way. Nowadays, you will always hear these talks about children waiting for the elders to die so that they can…I didn’t want it that way. I wanted it my way. To live on my own terms. I visit my children and they visit me. And God has given me a guarantee that he will feed me.”

It is this absolute confidence in his running and in his maker that made him break the barrier of 29 minutes at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. “I knew there was no medal,” he says. “But if I am there among the best in the world, I will break my own personal record at least.” Hari Chand ran without spikes on the Montreal tartan track and clocked 28:48. In fact, he ran barefoot. In the middle of the pack with the great Finnish runner Lasse Viren leading. Those were the days of Dick Quax, Rod Dixon and Brendan Foster. All of them tall athletes. Viren who won the 1976 gold in 5000m and 10,000m was 5’11’. 

“I think I was too short,” says Hari Chand. But then with a smile, says, “So was Miruts Yifter.” In the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Yifter, the great Ethiopian runner, won the 5000m and 10,000m double gold. Yifter was around 5’3”. More than the height, the difference was in the training methods. Lasse Viren had spent time training in the high-altitude of Kenya.

Back from Montreal, Hari Chand set his sights on the 1978 Asian Games in Bangkok. It was a cinder track and with a pacesetter in the form of Harjit Singh, he won a double gold in the 5000m and 10,000m. It was an amazing feat which catapulted him into the rare group of athletes, who have won two gold medals at a single Asian Games. The boy from Hoshiarpur had come good. He still remembers being surrounded at the Palam airport with the Custom officials jokingly referring to his bringing back ‘excess gold.’

In today’s athletic world, where science and technology is being melded to observe running patterns, where even a heel-strike on the track is analysed like the rocks on Mars, Hari Chand, has his own advice. “No point in giving crores after an athlete wins a medal,” he says. “Let the government spend crores on his training ensuring that he wins the medal. After winning, he would anyway, be rich.”

Hari Chand was running beautifully in 1981, as he trained in Germany. His sights were set on the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi and he wanted the double of 5000 and 10,000 yet again. Viral fever struck around six months before the Games taking away training time, reducing his weight. “I knew it was over,” he says — sadness still lingers on as he looks towards the Nehru Stadium. “I didn’t even watch the Games. I just left for Neemuch and joined training at the CRPF.”

What he leaves unsaid is that after the 1976 Olympics, Hari Chand had an offer from the University of Nevada to come on an athletics scholarship. “I couldn’t speak English and I didn’t know where Nevada was,” he says. “They pursued me till 1980 and then gave up.”

Today, athletes are trailed by a team of scientists, nutritionists, engineers, wear biofeedback sensors, delivering mega-tonnes of data. Hari Chand injected himself with optimism, ran on courage and simply persevered to be one of the all-time greats.

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