Mirabai Chanu eyes Paris encore
CHENNAI: For an athlete, invincibility and immortality fade with injury. Every little thing hurts, sometimes more than the injury and even failures. There is a small anecdote that a support staff was narrating about the Tokyo 2020 Olympic weightlifting silver medallist Mirabai Chanu.
The Asian Games was a disaster (another Asian Games hampered by injury). When she returned home, she was all alone. No one came to welcome her. There was no brouhaha. She was distraught and hurt. “When I won the Olympic medal, everyone was there, now that I have not won anything, no one is even coming to meet me,” she had lamented. That’s the predicament an athlete lives with. Mirabai too had to learn to live with it.
The Paris Olympics is where she is hoping to redeem herself. Once again plagued by injury in the run-up to the Games, it has not been the best buildup. One last lift. One last hurrah. That’s all she is dreaming of right now.
Days before leaving for the Olympics, the training centre — National Centre of Excellence (NCOE) in Patiala — converted itself into a giant edifice of hope. Players were seen going through their last-minute rituals. Some were taking a break while some were just loitering around and finding solace in the familiar and friendly settings of the sprawling campus. For some it’s more than a training centre. Mirabai too misses the centre while away competing or training. “I miss this place even when I am home!” she confides.
In one corner is the women’s hostel – shared by Olympic medallists and international athletes. Mirabai is one among them. It was Thursday (June 27), an off-day from training, about 10 days before she and her coach left for France for training. The pressure is slowly building. She has to defend the medal and has just about recovered from her injury.
For coach Vijay Sharma, this is the time to build confidence. He feels the physical training and workout phase is over and it is all about the mind now. He was at the newly-renovated weightlifting hall in Patiala, putting together Mirabai’s Paris journey. “You cling on to anything that gives you that two per cent boost,” he says. “Whatever gives you hope and confidence soothes the mind. This is the time when players think that even if we get two per cent benefit, it’s huge. Mira and I have spoken to the sleep therapist and have learnt a few things. We think that these things will come in handy.”
“The next few weeks are very important,” Sharma sounded almost prophetic. “This is the time when we have to gain in confidence; how to reach and maintain her peak. We have trained until now. How we can convert this training into a good result will depend on these intervening weeks.”
Mirabai’s coach is like her shadow. The two have been together for more than a decade and he plans everything for her. The ‘I’ has given way to ‘we’. Whenever the coach spoke, it was about ‘us’ and not ‘me’. It was not all about success either. Sports apes the vicissitudes of life and it was apt when he said, “We learnt from our failures and we have been still learning.”