The First Individual Golds Of India In Olympic Sport
India’s first individual gold on the biggest stage in world sport. You may be thinking of Abhinav Bindra’s Olympic gold medal in 2008, but our first individual gold actually came way back in Heidelberg, Germany at the 1972 Paralympics. Murlikant Petkar, a TELCO employee from Maharashtra, took to international sport like a duck to water. At his debut Paralympics in Heidelberg, not knowing the local language and still adapting to foreign food, having competed at his first ever international event only four years before, he broke the world record for 50m freestyle swimming in his classification. Petkar seemed to have acquired a taste for gold from the rare and privileged discovery he had made a couple of years before the Olympics – at the 1970 Commonwealth Games. He had found that a gold medal at an international event meant the raising of the national flag in honour of his feat!Going further back in time, his story takes on a surreal edge. How did an Army jawan at EME Secunderabad, who was a boxing enthusiast and also happened to be a javelin ace, go on to set a world record in swimming? How did he take seven bullets to his spine and, yet, end up becoming a world beater? Almost entirely by coincidence. The eagle eye of a coach who spotted his innate swimming talent, the doctor who recommended swimming for rehabilitation to the wounded soldier, the support of a few strategic well-wishers along the way, including his employers, led by the illustrious JRD Tata… all of these pushed a simple yet outrageously talented village boy in the direction of international competition. As is evident, a lot of pieces of the jigsaw fit together to land him where they did - on the top step of the Paralympic podium in far-away Germany.
This medal came 25 years after India attained independence, and for various reasons, has not become part of popular Indian sporting lore. I can only hypothesise that our society was perhaps too preoccupied at the time with other aspects of nation-building. Sport – especially para sport – did not grab the common imagination, perhaps because the story was not told in technicolour detail at the time. To me, this was a missed opportunity to unite a nation dealing with the aftermath of two wars, by celebrating a homegrown champion who had won on the biggest stage of all. Para sport has been largely neglected in sports coverage over the years. One may even wonder why we need a separate Paralympic Games when we have the Olympic Games, which functions as the biggest carnival of world sport? Why can’t the Olympic Games incorporate para-events as the Commonwealth Games do? There is a straightforward, simple and pragmatic response to that – to give para athletes a stage of their own, one that does not have its roots in sympathy, or the dialectic between ability and disability. Having had the good fortune to witness one such Paralympics myself in 2016, I staunchly support having a separate event, given how the competing athletes stand apart and distinguish themselves, not simply for the physical reasons one would imagine. The story of another such medallist from Punjab is as wondrous as that of Murlikant Petkar. In the late 1970s, in a village named Mehsampur in Punjab, Rajinder Rahelu was born with poliomyelitis. Oblivious to the concept of a wheelchair, unable to recognise the requirements of his physical challenge, Rajinder performed his own chores by crawling from one room to the other as a boy. Gifted with a powerful upper body honed by having to compensate for his stunted lower body, Rajinder was pushed in the direction of bench press events, and grew up competing with able-bodied athletes. As late as 2002, he was still far from aiming to compete at the Paralympics. He only heard about his current event, powerlifting, for the first time when the Chairman of Powerlifting India, Mr. B. M. Ishwar, laid eyes on him and subsequently pushed him to make the switch to the discipline.
Far from being inspired, Rajinder had to overcome an initial resistance to the idea of competing with other “disabled” people. Then again, why wouldn’t he? He had grown up competing with the able-bodied athletes as their equal, after all. In India, then as it is now, admitting to a disability almost inevitably elicited feelings of pity and placed you in a position of helplessness and dependence. Rajinder had always taken charge of his life. Not one to be daunted by the prospect of travel for competition, he had even changed trains without a wheelchair on the way to one of his nationals. For anyone familiar with the chaos and hubbub of Indian train stations, it is incredible to picture the sight and self-confidence of this youngster, believing that he could crawl from one platform to the other without injury. Unfortunately, he did get injured. He eventually found out about wheelchairs, but the cost of one was absolutely prohibitive to him. Since there was no way he could spend Rs. 5,000-6,000 on such ‘luxury’, he fashioned one for himself! Well-meaning friends helped him with ideas as well as the product design. Rajinder eventually ended up using the wheelchair from 1999 right up until the Athens Paralympics in 2004, where he won the bronze medal in powerlifting. What drives a person to compete in sport, in a seemingly thankless profession devoid of the prospect of reward or recognition? Murlikant Petkar had attempted to fight for national honours post his Paralympic medal, but soon given up the quest. Rajinder, had never even heard of the Arjuna Award when he was informed that he was in line to win it – as a result of his Paralympic medal! The Arjuna Award fell into his lap relatively easily. However, Rajinder then had to embark on a four-year chase, along with Devendra Jhajharia, the javelin-throwing gold medallist from the 2004 Paralympics, to receive his prize money dues. Both athletes spent time shunting between cities, petitioning ministers, pointing out caveats in existing policies. They finally received their cash prizes in 2010, a full six years after their accomplishments. Clearly then, the allure did not lie in financial gains. Ask para-athlete and disability rights activist Deepa Malik about her reason to pursue sport, and she puts it beautifully, “Disability gave focus to my life and sport gave it direction”.
An Army daughter and Army wife, it is no coincidence that Deepa went on to become India’s first female Paralympic medallist in Rio. Having survived a potentially fatal tumour removal which left her paralysed from the chest below, Deepa’s life could have taken a very different trajectory with her constantly fighting personal and systemic battles. She chose to busy herself in advocacy. To continue being a biker, she procured a rally licence for herself as a differently abled person, registering additional carriages for her car, tweaking her bike to suit her condition and completing the gruelling Raid de Himalaya. At the Indian Spinal Injury Centre, an Indian-origin volunteer worker opened her eyes to the prospect of a lifestyle as active as the one she had been used to before her surgery. Seeing videos of him in the gym, in the swimming pool, going about his business, leading an active, sporting life, Deepa made it her life’s mission to push her activity level beyond just hydrotherapy. Offered a chance to swim at the Para-nationals, she went on to compete internationally for the first time at the FESPIC Games in 2006. Being articulate, multilingual and older than the posse of other Indian athletes was of significant advantage to Deepa. She soon became somewhat of a resource person for the contingent and learnt in the process about new directions that her own career could take. The younger athletes pointed out that her height and long hands could be used to her advantage in athletics disciplines.
This coincided with the realisation that her career as an international swimmer was not destined to go too far; after all, she was being pitted against amputees who had less lower body weight to carry in the water, while she had to contend with the prospect of dragging a 5’9” frame along behind her as a deadweight. In 2009, at the International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports (IWAS) World Games in Bangalore, Deepa was disqualified off the javelin results sheet due to an unfortunate error in recording her classification. A stroke of luck coincided with what could have been a fatal blow to her career – she woke up the next morning to find herself listed (wrongly) on the Shotput list in her actual category F53, slated to compete in a sport she had never tried her hand at. With no background on how to throw, the instinctive sportswoman landed the bronze medal by throwing purely with her gut, and subsequently found herself well and truly ensconced in the world of international para sport. For Deepa, hard fought medals had been interspersed with battles for event inclusion at important tournaments, equal recognition, government job opportunities et al. These medals, strangely, were earned not just by triumphing over international competition. Even participation at the event was a hard-fought privilege - raise funding, get clearances in time for an official Indian contingent to be sent abroad. Diverse entities such as the ruling party of the time, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (MYAS), the Sports Authority of India, all had to pitch in at various points to issue clearances. It is simply astounding that Deepa stayed in her sport for as long as she did, but she was very much a medal prospect in need of support at the time the GoSports Foundation’s Para Champions Programme received sufficient corporate CSR funding to take off in 2015. This was a year ahead of the Rio Paralympics, and at a time when the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) had been derecognised and disbanded. We had long been toying with the idea of instituting a separate programme for the differently-abled.
The need was glaring; they faced all the challenges that our able-bodied athletes did, and then some. No guidance on how to obtain their classification, the paperwork and requisite medical documentation for this, meagre financial muscle for travel, infrastructural access barriers, lopsided (and to a large extent, non-existent) recognition structures – all meant that there were huge challenges to be overcome before our athletes could be ready for global competition. Fortunately, we found corporate partners; large organisations that wanted to contribute to enabling sporting achievement in an inclusive manner. This meant that 18 emerging and elite para athletes could receive immediate support through the Para Champions Programme on their quest to make it to Rio. Some were receiving access to high performance training stints outside India, cleared under the government-supported TOPS (Target Olympic Podium Scheme). Many still needed access to seemingly simple things like funding of their escorts’ travel, access to better equipment, funding and guidance in the area of sports science – including a customised nutrition programme, strength and conditioning advice, injury management, all designed to help elite athletes do what they do best – excel. Looking back down the long history of India’s presence at the Paralympics, the one thing that quickly becomes apparent is that athletes were emerging by dint of sheer perseverance and talent, aided and abetted by many strokes of sheer good fortune, receiving only minimal assistance from the formal ecosystem. Even now, the pace of change on ground is glacial. However, nothing was ever achieved by sitting back and complaining, and I am fortunate to have a team that believes in being the force for change and putting in the hard yards to see the needle move. I’d like to elaborate on this by telling you the story of the Rio Paralympics, from the GoSports Foundation perspective. It all came together for us at Rio; 11 from our Para Champions Programme had qualified for the mega-event. Once I got there though, the ground reality shook me.
There was literally no Indian media covering the events, the stories of our heroes were destined to be lost in all the mainstream content back home. The media and sport-loving population was still fixated on how the able-bodied contingent had, only a fortnight previously, brought back just two Olympic medals. Our team chose to make the most of this opportunity. I was on ground and could easily be the mouthpiece relaying our champions’ achievements back home. Sure, I did not have accreditation, but I eventually met a kind media director who, puzzled by the fact that multiple Indian athletes were coming to the gate of the Village to meet with a strange lady, gave me a pass to enter the Village. I will forever be indebted to him for this simple act of kindness. Back home, the stage was set for this event to be more special than previous editions. Our Principal Partners IndusInd Bank created an anthem to celebrate the achievements of para athletes. Titled “Jeet Ka Halla” and released to perfect timing just before the Games, it went viral. Our Associate Partners Sony Pictures Networks, for the first time in India, acquired the rights to broadcast the highlights of the Indian Paralympics to audiences back home.
