Indian Female Athletes At The LA Olympics

I was 13 when the LA Games – and PT Usha’s Olympic dream – went down. All around me, post an all-too-brief dalliance with optimism, adults were falling back, almost with a sense of relief, into the comfort zone of their favourite pastime – dissing the country, despairing about her ever being able to make anything of herself. Luckily, our sporting merits as a nation (or lack of them, as had been amply displayed) did not affect me, a nerdy teenager who had no sporting talent and who routinely skived off PE begging a stomach ache, in quite the same way. Seeing how close an Indian woman – who had done nothing more than follow her coach’s injunctions to the letter, work very, very hard, and believe in herself – had gotten to an Olympic medal impacted me in a different way – it turned me into a lifelong fan. I noticed, therefore, other stories about Indian female athletes that got buried in the depressing post-Olympics analysis, and in the other awful events of a particularly Orwellian 1984. Did you know, for instance, that 18-year-old Shiny Abraham (now Wilson) became the first Indian woman to qualify for an Olympic track and field semi-final when she made the cut in the 800m at LA, the day before Usha did the same in her event? I did, and tom-tommed it to whoever would listen. Shiny would not make the final, but she would go on to achieve other unique distinctions in the future, including becoming the only female Indian athlete to participate in four – that’s right, four – Olympics.

At the opening ceremony of her penultimate Olympics – Barcelona 1992 – she became the first woman to win the honour of marching at the head of the Indian contingent. (Let’s press the pause button for a moment here. Let’s reflect on the fact that the Olympics is a circus of extraordinary ‘freaks’, and that just qualifying for it catapults an athlete into the ‘superhuman’ category. It might help put the enormity of Shiny’s achievement – qualifying for four successive Olympics – into perspective. ) Here’s another story from LA. Did you know that the first Indian relay team to ever make an Olympic final did so in the 4x400m relay at the 1984 Games, and comprised the crack team of Kerala girls Usha, Shiny and MD Valsamma, along with – my jingoistic heart always swells a little at this point – Karnataka’s own Vandana Rao? Well, I knew that story too. Shiny Abraham remembers the high of that fortnight very well. “I was not sad at all to lose the 800m semi-final – qualifying itself was good enough for me,” she said in an interview some years ago. “(As for the relay. . . ) it was such a shock for everyone there in the US to see Indian girls in an athletics final! It was a great Olympics for all of us girls. ” The rest of the eighties, and part of the nineties, were all about Indian women in track and field – in this department of sport at least, the men did not figure at all in the public consciousness. With local icons and a culture of ‘women who run and jump’ taking root, the south continued to be the fertile ground that birthed the country’s champion female athletes, year after year, ATF meet after ATF meet, Asian Games after Asian Games. I followed their fortunes as they did their country proud on the international stage – not just the four women mentioned earlier, but also sprinters Vandana Shanbhag, Kutty Saramma and Ashwini Nachappa (in 1990, Ashwini beat PT Usha in the 200m, not once but twice, becoming more famous for that than for her other, considerable achievements), heptathlete Reeth Abraham, long jumpers Mercy Kuttan and Anju Bobby George, and long-distance runners Geeta Zutshi and Suman Rawat. But while the 1986 Asian Games in Seoul returned a rich haul of wins, helping India retain the fifth place on the overall medals tally it had first gained for itself in 1982 (four of the five gold medals we won in Seoul had our brave girls’ names on them, including three individual ones for Usha and a fourth for the members of the same relay team that had made the final in LA), and while the Asian Track & Field Meets provided our athletes some good pickings, success at the Olympics, and even the other Asian Games, continued to elude them. In fact, Olympic success eluded the men too – the medal drought that began in LA would continue for a dozen years, all the way until Atlanta 1996, when Leander Paes became only the second Indian man in a hundred years to bring home a medal, a bronze, in an individual event. (The other was KD Jadhav, who won the bronze in freestyle wrestling in Helsinki in 1952. ) What was perhaps more worrying was the fact that the supply of international-level track and field athletes seemed to be drying up, belying the promise that had been held out so tantalisingly in the eighties. More importantly, despite all the schemes to identify talent at the grassroots levels that the government had set up, other sporting disciplines hadn’t yet thrown up any female rock stars.