Bhawana qualifies for Olympics in 20km race
How seldom has it happened that an unseeded competitor goes on to win the top prize, break the national record and make the cut for the Olympics at a national championship?
Bhawna Jat, all of 23, made the world sit up and take notice when she broke through the white ribbon at the finish line as the clock read 1:29:54 — well within the Olympics cut-off of
1:31:00 — in the women’s
20km race walk event at the National Championships held in Ranchi on Saturday.
“I was competing with just one aim and that was to win. I ran with vengeance on my mind. I put all my hatred into the 20km race walk and channelled that revulsion into fuel for every step that I took on the course today (Saturday). I certainly wanted to prove my point and I am glad I was able to pull it off,” Bhawna said in an exclusive interview with this newspaper after winning gold.
What pushed Bhawna to the brink, that she surpassed her personal best of
1:38.30s — set in October
2019 at the National Open Championships — by close to eight minutes and 40 seconds in less than four months?
“I have been a Railways employee since 2016. After winning gold at the All
India Inter-Railway Athletics Championships in August 2019 in the 20,000m race walk, I was entitled to paid leave of 330 days which was meant to be used for training. But the Divisional Commercial Manager, Howrah, refused to sign my papers that entitled me to get leave of absence for my training. In fact, even a month before the All India Railways meet in August, I was asked to work the whole of July and my timings got affected,” the Rajasthani said.
“If I had to do something big, I had to make sacrifices. For the National Championship too I had to make the big decision of taking a leave without pay for three months with the Railways. I could not have won or made the Olympics cut if I had not taken leave without pay. It’s very difficult to compete without proper training,” Bhawna said with a heavy heart.
Bhawna, who started as a junior employee with a salary of `21,000 with the Railways in 2016, is entitled to a salary of `40,000 after her promotion in 2018. But for the last three months she has not received her salary from the Railways as she was training for the national meet in Jaipur.
When this newspaper tried to get in touch with Mr Rajiv Ranjan, Senior DCM, Howrah, he refused to comment.
Bhawna, who hails from a small town called Kabra in Rajsamand, Rajasthan, has a loan of `7 lakh on her head that she took for the medical treatment of her eldest brother Raju Kumar. With no salary being credited to her account since November, Bhawna had no choice but to borrow from her relatives for her training, diet, house rent in Jaipur and pay the EMIs against the loan she took for her brother’s treatment.
Raju had been diagnosed with a mental disorder five years back. Bhawna’s father Shankar Lal Jat is a farmer, her mother Nosar Devi is a housewife and her second elder brother Prakash Chand works as a tyre mechanic in a private firm.
“Things were really difficult for me before the event. I had to scramble to make ends meet. But my coach Gurmukh Sihag kept me going. We used to train from 4 am at the ground. The winters in Jaipur are really harsh but it did not deter me from my goal,” an emotional Bhawna recalled.
For someone to become an athlete from Kabra is no joke. But how did race walk happen for Bhawna? “When I was 14, my school’s PT teacher Hira Lal sir told me, ‘If you do well in the race walk, you will land a good job’. Hira Lal sir was my first coach. What started as an excuse to get a job slowly became my passion. Once I started winning medals at the school nationals, junior nationals, junior federation games and inter-university games, I knew I could make it big in race walk,” the student of Rajkiya Madhyamik School, Kabra, said.
“In my initial days, I competed barefoot. It was only after I started competing at the national level in 5K that I bought my first shoe,” she added.
For the Athletics Federation of India, which did not have a camp for women’s race walkers last year due to sorry performances by them in various meets; Bhawna’s performance has come as a bright spark. “Bhawna’s performance in Ranchi is outstanding to say the least. It comes as a welcome surprise for us. Liu Hong’s timing at the
2016 Rio Olympics was
1:28.35 seconds and Bhawna finished with 1:29.54. If she continues this way she could very well be a medal prospect for India at Japan,” Adille Sumariwalla, the AFI president said.