Know Parveen Hooda 24 RURKI, HARYANA MEDAL CABINET
MUMBAI: “Arrey, mat poochiye (don’t ask)!” Parveen Hooda shoots back at the mention of home.
Home, in Rohtak’s Rurki village, is where the boxer hasn’t been in months. Plans to make a dash last weekend stood cancelled because training took precedence. For her birthday last month, her parents offered to go where she is — the national camp in Patiala — but a three-session day played party pooper there too.
“I do miss my family, my home. But then I think: abhi bas 2-3 mahine hai, phir aaram se ghar pe rahungi (there are just 2-3 months to go, then I can relax at home),” she said.
That feeling aside, Hooda, one of the four Indian boxers to have qualified for the Paris Olympics so far, is relishing this build-up phase.
At 24, the 57kg boxer is already a medal winner at the World Championships (2022, bronze), Asian Championships (2022, gold) and the Asian Games (2023, bronze). Yet it was the Olympics that had been a “dream for so many years”.
“There is a sense of pressure, but also of excitement,” she said. “I’m focussing on every little detail in training. I’m confident I’ll do well there.”
That confidence stems from Hooda’s steady rise in international boxing, her growth trajectory meeting morale-boosting checkpoints at those big events over the last couple of years. From each of those competitions, including the Asian Games where she lost in the semi-final but secured the Paris quota, she returned richer by
WEIGHT CATEGORY more than merely medals.
“The biggest thing I learnt was to not have any self-doubts. I beat some top boxers in these competitions, and that gave me a lot of motivation and faith. The experience of competing at that top level was also helpful in how to fight with these boxers,” Hooda said.
Preparing for Paris, she is using that experience to build her technical side of boxing. The defeat in Hangzhou, to Chinese Taipei’s multiple-time Worlds medallist Lin Yu-ting, compelled her to look beyond her strength of counterattacks. She has now improved in going for attacks — rather than wait for counters — early, as well as fighting from all ranges.
“Earlier, I would rely on my counter game. I realised that you can’t have just one style of play. I’ve developed my attacking and close-range game since the Asian Games. Now I can fight from all distances — middle, close, long.”
Making alterations isn’t new to Hooda. Graduating from youth to seniors, she had made