Not just pain, now tales of triumph too

Rohit Mahajan

Ten Indians have won 11 medals in the last three Olympic Games — that’s a veritable torrent after mere four individual medals in 18 previous Olympics. India’s typical Olympics stories had been littered with near-misses and what-ifs. From 1996, though, India has won at least one medal in every Olympics — we’re on a roll, so to speak. This has had a deep impact on this excellent book — the stories now tell not merely of pain, but pain and triumph. Hard-luck tales of our stellar athletes — Henry Rebello or Milkha Singh or PT Usha — were like salt on wounds; the stories in this book work as salve.

When this book appeared in its first avatar over a decade ago, its writers confess, it was a product of digging through the archives — Majumdar and Mehta wrote that first book as historians. The current version is significantly enriched because the two have actually done extensive reporting for it — they have been ringside to personally witness history being made by icons such as PV Sindhu, Abhinav Bindra or Sushil Kumar. The personal touch enlivens the book — in this, the writers are both historians and reporters. It was an excellent historical document with original research on India’s baby steps into the Olympics; it now is a complete story of India’s past and present in the Olympics, and a hopeful peep into the future.

The stories of the athletes are not new — they can’t be, for sportspersons such as Bindra or P Gopichand or Dipa Karmakar have been in the public eye for years and are subjects of public curiosity, adoration and scrutiny. Indeed, several of them have an autobiography or a biography detailing their journeys. A retelling of their heartwarming stories, though, can only be inspirational.

The story of Gopichand creating a ‘factory’of champions is the high point of the book; the writers call him “almost saintly” for his humility and calmness and focus, and they’re not wrong. Gopichand’s story elevates him with each re-reading. He himself is a champion who dragged himself to the top after a potentially career-ending injury; to then go on to produce two Olympics medallists is a story without a parallel in Indian sport.

The writers have to be credited for not ignoring the hitherto invisible Olympics medallists, the Paralympians such as Deepa Malik and Devendra Jhajharia, who turned tragedy into triumph. Jhajharia’s is a story of typically Indian casual horror — climbing a tree, he touched a live electric cable and lost an arm. He was only eight. Braving scorn and discouragement, he turned himself into an Olympics champion. The sad part? Even after the then Prime Minister and sports minister assured him support and funding in 2004, he got a promised sum of Rs10 lakh after a wait of six years. That shows the power of babudom, which has often been a killer of plans and schemes to achieve success in sport in India.