“Every jump was a war”
Deep in the bowels of Tokyo’s National Stadium, high jumper Sharad Kumar is trying to come to terms with what he has just accomplished. Even through the haze of euphoria, he sums up, with one throwaway sentence, what it was like to win a bronze medal in the men’s high jump event: “every jump was a war,” he says after competing in the pouring rain of Tokyo.
For all three eventual medallists — American gold medallist Sam Grewe, silver medallist Mariyappan Thangavelu and bronze winner Sharad — the rain, which got stronger as the competition heated up, posed unique challenges.
In Grewe’s first attempt to better his own world record after the gold medal was sealed, the strap on his artificial leg broke as he was about to take off for a jump. Then, during his second attempt, he realised that the velcro strap on his left spike would not stay in place as it was “fully saturated with water” because it was raining heavily. So, he taped it with duct tape for the third attempt. But still, it proved to be a tricky affair and he gave up eventually.
For Mariyappan, the pouring rain meant the sock on his left foot was soaked with water, making things difficult in gripping and take off on the approach.
“Romba kashtam aairuchu (It became very difficult),” he said. “As the night went on, and the height went up before 1.80m, the rain got really heavy, and consequently I could not nail the take off. Since I compete wearing just a sock in my right leg rather than a shoe, it got all wet and soggy.”
For Sharad, who was already hurting due to a meniscus injury to his knee, the rain made things difficult as one misstep could heighten the pain, or worse, cause the injury to get exacerbated.
“It was very dangerous. We have just one leg to balance ourselves and some of us wear a spike in just one of the legs. This makes it even more dangerous to compete when it’s pouring,” said Sharad.
The rain during the competition was just a minor side plot for all three protagonists, though. For each of the trio, it was nothing compared to the battles each of them had fought — and won — just to be at the Paralympics.
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Barely half a day before Tuesday’s high jump showdown at the Tokyo Paralympics, Sharad had decided he would not — could not! — compete. The pain in his leg was too unbearable to be ignored. He spent all of the night howling in pain after having injured his meniscus that evening in training.
“All I did was cry, cry, cry!” said Sharad recollecting the night before.
The pain was so overwhelming that he called his parents and friends to break it to them that he would not be competing.
“I told my father, I’m done! I said that I was feeling that I was being punished for some sin I had committed. Then my father suggested that I read the Bhagawad Gita,” he said. That calmed him down, and he decided to soldier on.
Sharad was two years old when it transpired that he had polio. He was sent, along with his brother, to a boarding school since his early childhood. “The only thing available to us in those days was studying or going to the ground to play,” he said.
While his brother excelled in whichever sport he tried his hand at, Sharad was excluded due to the polio. “When we would go back home, my brother would have so many certificates from different competitions he had won. And I used to have nothing! Maybe a book I was awarded for a runners-up spot in a spelling competition in school,” he added. “That’s what made me think, one day I need to go home and get shaabashi from my dad!”
His teachers were against Sharad competing in any sport due to the fear that he might injure other limbs as well. But his brother vouched for him and changed their minds.
That’s when high jump caught his attention.
The sport has taken him places, most notably on the podium at Tokyo 2020. But the journey to Tokyo was a lonely one for him. For three years — funded by the Sports Authority of India though the TOP Scheme and supported by GoSports Foundation — he has been living more or less by himself in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, training under Nikitin Yevhen. Things got complicated when the pandemic forced a lockdown in Ukraine. While he usually trained alone under Yevhen, the lockdown meant he could not even do that, making him feel all the more lonely.
“Being by myself, that too in a city where not too many people speak a common language as you, made it challenging. There are times when I had no one to talk to. I’d feel I should just go back to India. I’ve suffered anxiety. Depression too. It also snows a lot. Anxiety would build-up when there were documentation issues,” he said before crediting Paralympic Committee of India’s office bearers Gursharan Singh and Satyanarayana for helping him out on each occasion.
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Mariyappan Thangavelu, visibly shorter than the other two athletes on the podium at Tokyo 2020, came into these Paralympics as a favourite for a gold medal — a stature that’s a rarity in Indian para-sport. After all, India’s para-athletes have won just 12 medals at the Paralympics from 1968 till Rio. And Mariyappan was coming to Tokyo as a reigning champion, having won gold five years ago at Rio 2016.
Fittingly, he was named as India’s flagbearer for the Tokyo Paralympics. However, he spent the Opening Ceremony in quarantine after being deemed a close contact of a COVID-positive passenger on his flight to Tokyo.
Not only did that incident snatch away what would have been a treasured memory for the high jumper, it also affected his practice regime since he could not train with others as a precaution.
“It was very disappointing to miss out on being the flagbearer. I had to train separately, and stay separately as I was asked to quarantine. But I wanted to make India proud by winning gold,” he said. “But eventually, whatever is written by fate, happens.”
Fate has been exceptionally cruel to him. He was just five years old when his right leg was crushed under a bus. He was raised by a single mother, Saroja, after his father abandoned the family. The family fought its way out of crippling poverty as Saroja took up jobs as a labourer and then selling vegetables.
He himself worked as newspaper hawker between 2012 and 2015 before being discovered by his current coach Satyanarayana.
“Winning the silver at Tokyo, I am happy and disappointed at the same time,” he said in Tamil.
***
At the age of 13, Sam Grewe needed to make a decision that even adults would struggle to process. Doctors had discovered a fist-sized tumour against his femur, caused by a rare bone cancer called osteosarcoma. He had two options, amputate or save the limb with a surgery, which would mean his chances of playing any sport were gone. Still just in the seventh grade, he made the choice to amputate, undergoing a complex procedure called rotationplasty surgery. While Grewe uses an artificial limb on his right leg, the gold medal at Tokyo 2020, he said, left him vindicated about the decision he had made.
He leapt over the bar placed at 1.88m, a height which was just under his own world record (1.90m), to snatch the gold medal that Mariyappan had pipped him to at Rio 2016.
When Grewe was younger and consultations with doctors and surgeons was routine for him for a few years, he noticed how under-represented people with disabilities were in the medical profession. That’s what set him on the journey to pursue a career in medicine.
“I wanted to be the doctor who taught a kid about adaptive sports, who helped them learn the opportunities that exist for a person with a new disability, because I had no idea and I was in a really dark period because of that,” said Grewe, who enrolled just last month in medical school at the University of Michigan. “If I had to choose right now, I’d go into orthopaedic surgery.”
His dream to inspire others with similar disabilities, and guide them into adaptive sports, has already been realised. Compatriot Ezra Frech, who finished fifth in the high jump event on Tuesday, only took up the sport after watching Grewe compete at Rio 2016 five years ago.
And on Tuesday, just before he was about to compete, a Japanese volunteer handed Grewe a letter from the parent of a 13-year-old, who had also undergone rotationplastys surgery due to osteosarcoma in his knee.
“My son had osteosarcoma… Even though I knew details of the surgery, I was very anxious because there was no information about (life after the surgery for patients). Meanwhile we found out about you. High jump, the world champion. You gave great courage to my family. My son is watching on TV today,” wrote the parent.
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