NOTHING TO DISCUS
vikas Gowda is a giant. Well over two metres tall, he has the height of an NBA power forward and the bulk of a WWE wrestler. He eats two-anda-half kilos of chicken a day and drinks protein shakes in buckets. Maybe not buckets literally, but he might as well; it’d be more efficient.
Gowda throws the discus and the shot put. He has thrown the discus further than any Indian man ever has, holding the national record at 66.28 metres. He won gold at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, becoming the first Indian man since Milkha Singh in 1958 to win an athletics gold.
Given the paucity of Indian medals in the Olympics, and the fact that Gowda made the discus throw finals in London 2012, finishing eighth overall, he should arguably be more celebrated than he is. Until a shoulder injury put his Olympics participation in doubt, he was probably India’s biggest (literally) medal prospect in athletics. But Gowda moved to the US at age five. As a result, he has sometimes felt forgotten, neglected, back home.
The US has been important to Gowda. A mathematics major, he was a college athlete at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the famed Tarheels, where he won the national discus throwing title in 2006. It is in the US that Gowda has been able to receive the specialised technical training so intrinsic to an esoteric sport, the sort of training Indian athletes so rarely receive. Gowda trains with John Godina, a former world champion shot putter, who runs throwing academies in California and Arizona. Discus throwing—an iconic event, emblematic of the Olympics in a way sports such as golf, tennis and football can never be—is an extraordinary discipline, full of precise movements, minute elements that the uninitiated cannot possibly observe. And yet the object is so plain, so apparently simple—to throw a 2 kg disc as far as humanly possible. But to throw it as far as Olympic athletes do requires a combination of athletic skills, of speed and power and coordination and explosiveness.
Gowda, like so many athletes and celebrities, is on Twitter. Unlike them, though, he appears to be entirely uninterested, managing just 40 tweets since January 2015, when he joined. There is, though, one extraordinary video of him performing a single leg box jump. He approaches some plyometric boxes stacked high against a wall in a utilitarian gym in a stride or two before taking off with one leg and landing on the boxes with the other. For a towering man, even lumbering, he shows remarkable speed, agility and grace. Qualities that might, should he recover from injury, see him ascend to the podium in Rio, and win him the acclaim and fame in India he has long deserved.
“You don’t want to cloud your mind out there. You have to let it happen”