Behind the quest for an Olympic gold

How aspiring Olympians are sweating it out to go where only a few Indians have gone before

Jun 01, 2019, 07:34 IST2 min

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Olympian Jude Felix, coach of the junior hockey national team since 2017, is confident that India will qualify for the 2020 Games. The players are pushing for a place in the team, and eight of them have also been with the senior camp, of which five have gone on to play for India in the last two years, a record of sorts. Of the nine gold medals India has won in the Olympics so far, eight h

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Mary Kom is the only woman to have won the World Amateur Boxing Chamionship a record six times, and the only woman to have won a medal in each of the seven World Championships. Kom won bronze at the 2012 Olympics, and is now dreaming of gold at the 2020 Games, for which she is training hard at the Indira Gandhi Arena in Delhi. Fondly called India’s ‘Iron Lady’, she, too, feels tired on so

Image by Madhu Kapparath

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Jeremy Lalrinninga scripted history by winning India’s maiden gold at the 2018 Youth Olympics in men’s 62 kg weightlifting in Buenos Aires. Training at the Sports Authority of India’s high-altitude facility at Shilaroo in Himachal Pradesh, Lalrinninga has only one target—the 2020 Tokyo Games.

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Weightlifter Karnam Malleswari, the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal, moved to Yamunanagar in Haryana after marrying fellow lifter Rajesh Tyagi. She’s building a `22-crore facility on two acres, from ground up. When it opens in May 2020, the world-class infrastructure and coaching lab will aim to produce Olympic medallists, an ambition she has nursed over decades while working a

Image by Madhu Kapparath

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Training in India was always a Plan B for Abhinav Bindra who became the first and only Indian to win an individual gold in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. After retiring from shooting, Bindra decided to set it right and make training in India a Plan A for athletes. He has set up state-of-the-art, high-performance training centres with cutting-edge infrastructure in multiple places, including M

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