Vikas Gowda: Our hope for silverware in Athletics

Albert Einstein once said – “There is a driving force more powerful than the steam, the electricity and the atomic energy…the will.”

More than anything, this quote seems appropriate for Vikas Gowda, a US-based Indian discus thrower who is on his way to the London Olympics to compete in track and field.

Originally from Mysore (where he often comes down to meet his mother), this man has fought against all odds to reach  a position where he can end a starving India’s hunger for a medal in athletics; a hunger that has lasted for well over 100 years. 6 feet and 9 inches tall with the highest range and arm length amongst all the throwers in the world, Vikas Gowda is the best hope we Indians have to end this medal drought.

Be it financial, physical or otherwise, this man has overcome all obstacles to reach this stage. A university of North Carolina graduate, Vikas gave maths tuitions in addition to his father taking a $90,000 loan to meet his exorbitant training fees amounting to $150,000 (between January and the beginning of Olympics). Despite being at such an advanced stage in representing our country, he doesn’t have a sponsor, and the sports ministry provides for a mere 20% of his fees. He hasn’t minced any words about his disgust at the lack of financial support he has received and he doesn’t need to, either: it is truly a shame.

But whining about the government and its support to Indian athletes is another clichéd story; I am only going to concentrate on Vikas Gowda here. Our hope for a medal stands substantiated by the fact that Vikas has been training with John Godina, a three-time World Champion in shot put, for improving his throwing technique. In addition to training, Vikas has put great emphasis on diet, power workouts and the science which goes into this sport (just to give you a mental image, think of Silvester Stallone’s training sequences in the Rocky series. That will surely work to boost your hopes higher).

“He is focused for the Olympics and has been training really well for the past several months. We expect him to throw anywhere between 67-68m and hopefully, that would be good enough to win a medal,” Gowda’s father Shive, who is also his coach and will accompany him for the London Olympics, told Mail Today from Washington DC on Friday.

His father’s belief and the fact that he recorded his personal best throw of 66.28 recently in April is more than enough to fuel our hope and convert it to reality tomorrow when the discus throw event starts at the London Olympics.

“Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.” – Barack Obama