The brave-hearted Madhya Pradesh junior archers “achieved the impossible” by winning four medals at the National Championship. Escape from Shatabdi Express train En route to Dehradun, his head coach said on Monday. With less than an hour to reach Dehradun on Saturday, the team of eight-member recurve men and women experienced fears of being chased by black thick smoke and fire as they jumped to safety in an adjacent bogie .
But he lost all his belongings, from his equipment to the original documents including the Aadhaar card and the birth certificate after birth to his coach C5’s Kansrao.
Starting from scratch with a new set of equipment coming in the early hours of Sunday, the Archers, without any pre-match practice, began their campaign with two silver and one bronze in the recurve category and one team silver in the first mixed category. Done.
Class X student Sonia Thakur, who won two silver medals in the ranking round, went one step ahead of the Olympic round on Monday as she won almost a third, but defeated her Haryana rival for the bronze medal in a tough bout Diya was fixed in a tiebreaker.
Dehradun MP Head Coach Richhapal Singh said, “They have achieved something impossible. It happens in sports.”
Singh, who arrived with the compound team ahead of the recurve archers, remembers the incident Saturday when he first came to know about the horrific incident.
“He was driven to reach Dehradun at 12.55 am and we were leaving for practice after an early bite. But there was no phone call in my WhatsApp group to leave a message and learn about the trauma.”
“The first thing I asked them was” Are you all safe? “” After hearing that they were all safe, our first task was to boost their morale and make sure they focused on the competition the next day . “
With the joint support of the MP State Administration and the Archery Association of India, they managed to get a new set of equipment ordered from Patiala.
“We were told that the equipment would land around 2pm, so we made sure the archers got some rest before they arrived because they had an overnight sleep in the shop, which took hours to do something.”
So all the coaching staff and archers gathered in their hotel lobby at 2 in the afternoon and got involved in the task of setting them up, which required cutting and fetching arrows. He then reached the survey ground at 6 am to get some desperate practice three hours before the competition.
“Just tuning them was not enough. It takes months for an archer to set a finger tap with a release. So to win and shoot medals with a new set of bows and arrows, practice in less than two hours of his mental. Refers to the resolution. It was impossible.
“Everyone’s eyes were on us and everyone was asking about them during the competition. But the team kept their focus. It showed a different kind of attitude,” he said.
The truck driver’s son, Amit Kumar, who won a bronze in the individual ranking round prior to Sonia Thakur’s participation for silver in the mixed pair, did not actually tell anyone in his family about the train incident.
Amit said, “They would have been nervous and it would have been difficult for me. So I remained a mummy. But now I have told them that I have got two medals. They would have known about the incident by now,” Amit said.
Class IX student Sonia, who finished with a silver in the individual doubles round before the double with Amit in mixed doubles, was horrified to see her personal belongings going up in smoke.
Sonia recalled, “Seeing the bogey burning in front of our eyes was a devastating scene. But coaches and family members were convinced that ‘life is more important.”
Promoted
“We all got amazing support and the equipment arrived, so there was no looking back for us. We had to live up to their expectations and it showed in our performance.
“The last few days have taught us the most important lesson of life: never lose your focus,” concluded Sonia.
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