‘Chocolate’ girl with dozen toes, Swapna has faced struggles of life

JAKARTA: Swapna Barman’s craving for chocolate could well have cost her gold at the Asian Games. Just before her competition began on Tuesday, she started writhing from tooth pain, forcing her to compete with a medicated tape covering her right jaw.

“I had severe pain in my right jaw and couldn’t take medication because of the stringent anti-doping rules. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I would be able to give my best with this killing pain. But, somehow, I got the motivation over the last two days to win the Asian Games gold,” said the Jalpaiguri girl after clinching the heptathlon gold.

“I told myself that if I have to win, I’ll have to forget the pain. I was also nursing a right knee injury and that too was troubling me,” said Swapna who started as a high jumper in 2013 but later moved to heptathlon.

With 6026 points, Swapna won the gold by a massive margin, with China’s Wang Qingling coming second with 5954 points and Yuki Yamasaki of Japan notching a personal best of 5873 on way to bronze.

Going into the final phase of the gruelling event — 800m — she knew she had to just keep pace with the Chinese to clinch gold. Though Swapna — whose mother works in a tea estate and her father a rickshaw driver before a stroke left him bedridden in 2013 — finished fourth in 800m, she was way ahead of the field.

No Indian had won gold in heptathlon before Swapna, with Soma Biswas winning two consecutive silver medals at the 2002 Busan and the 2006 Doha Games and Karnataka’s JJ Shobha winning bronze at the 2006 Games. Pramila Aiyappa also had won bronze in 2010.

Life has given Swapna more pain than joy. Born with six toes on both feet, she has had to endure the pain of wearing normal shoes as no shoe-manufacturing company was ready to make customised shoes for her. “You can well imagine the pain I go through when I compete with spiked shoes which are narrow in front,” she said. Now her gripe will be taken more seriously.