It was around 130pm India time on 30 August 2021 that Deepa Malik, then President of the Paralympic Committee of India, called from Tokyo. It was a relatively relaxed afternoon and I was finishing lunch and getting ready to switch on the television and watch Sumit Antil in action. With Covid still a grim reality, work from home was on and you couldn’t do much either. With elderly parents, more so. Paralympics on television was an escape and helped me feel better.
At the time I had only heard of Sumit Antil. I wasn’t sure how good he was or that he was world record material. Ahead of the Paralympics everyone I had spoken to had mentioned Sumit and suggested that he could win gold in Tokyo. A couple of people had spoken about his talent and said that he could be the successor to Devendra Jhajharia as the poster boy for Indian Paralympic sport.
Going back to Deepa, she couldn’t hold her excitement on the call. With a lot of noise behind her, I could hear announcements being made, she was hardly audible. When I said that to her, she started screaming into the phone, “He has broken the world record”, she was saying. And just as it had sunk in, she was a few decibels higher. “He has broken it again. Watch watch”, she said. Deepa was speaking of Sumit who broke his own world record three times in 45 minutes and won his first Paralympic gold in the process.
“In all my years as an athlete I haven’t seen this happen. An Indian breaking the world record multiple times in 45 minutes is unheard of. Each throw is better than the other and he is a man possessed”, said Deepa.
It is true that we very rarely see an Indian throw a world record distance at an Olympic or Paralympic stage. And here was someone who had done so three times in under an hour. Understandably I was excited. Sumit Antil had broken new ground and was the story of the day.
I remember calling two of my friends, editors of two leading dailies in the country, to discuss a story idea on Antil. I was keen on doing a column and suggested the same. It was obvious that one would want to do a piece comparing Neeraj and Antil and how Javelin was the new national passion. We had an Olympic and Paralympic gold medallist in the event and it needed to be celebrated. To my surprise the response was lukewarm. Imagine the same response for Neeraj. In fact, when Neeraj had won the gold on 7 August 2021, my phone did not stop ringing in Tokyo. The editor of the television network I had a consultancy with had said to me, “Please get us the Neeraj exclusive. If you are able to get that done you should treat yourself to the best bottle of wine. It will be my gift to you”. She had forgotten I was a teetotaller in all her excitement!
Neeraj was the toast and everyone wanted a piece of him. In 3 weeks Sumit had done the same. He had broken the world record and had won the Paralympic gold for India. And yet the interest levels in the story wasn’t high enough. It was a reflection of what and how we continued to look at the Paralympics, something that Sumit himself was and is determined to change. While things have moved a lot since, they aren’t ideal yet in any which way and much can still be done to mainstream para sports in India.
Yesterday night in Delhi, Sumit added one more gold medal to his career. And that too with a fantastic throw of 71.37 meters. Yet he isn’t trending. He isn’t the number one headline either. Yet his quest will continue. So will ours. And yes we will win. Just like Sumit always does.
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