COURAGE AND DASH

every time she takes position at the starting blocks these days, the past two years flash by Dutee Chand in the instant before the starting gun is fired. The 100 metre dash from here to the finish line looks every bit as treacherous as that difficult time in her life, the conflict reflecting in every aspect of her being, from the taut muscles on her diminutive frame to the face that is only seemingly impassive. But then Dutee, 20, has long learnt to look challenge in the eye, and force it into submission with the sheer force of her determination.

It happened again in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Saturday, June 25 this year. She had clocked 11.30 seconds in the heats. Yet another point to prove, and she did it with elan, in a sizzling 11.24 seconds in the final. It fetched her a silver and a rare Olympic berth for India in the 100 metre dash, serving as a slap in the face of those who have questioned her representation as a female athlete when her body showed excess levels of the male hormone testosterone, a condition medically termed as hyperandrogenism.

Born to weaver couple Chakradhar and Akhuji Chand in Gopalpur, Odisha, Dutee, one of four sisters, had been steadily coasting to victories, becoming national champion in the under-18 category in 2012, winning a bronze in the 200 metres event at the Asian Championships in Pune the next year, and reaching the finals of the World Youth Championships in the same year, the first Indian to make it to a global athletics final in the 100 metres event.

She had returned from the Chinese Taipei after winning the 200 metre gold in the Asian Junior Championships in 2014 and gearing up for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games when her world came crashing down. She couldn’t make it to the squad because the hyperandrogenism clause in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) guidelines made her ineligible to compete as a female athlete.

Unwilling to let her hard-won achievements come to nought, Dutee challenged the IAAF clause in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which came out with a landmark decision in March 2015. The body ruled in favour of Dutee but not before the media, the people around her and peers put her through intense scrutiny, analysing each and every aspect of her femininity. Dutee battled them all, determined never to feel uncomfortable in her skin or be ashamed of herself.

She marked her return with a bang at the Federation Cup in New Delhi this April. Erasing Rachita Mistry’s 16-year-old 100 metre national record, she clocked 11.33 seconds, and has bettered her performance twice since then.

In a few days from now, Dutee will board the flight to Rio, India’s lone representative in the 100 metre event. Not since P.T. Usha at Moscow in 1980 has an Indian competed for the 100-metre sprint at the Olympics.

“It’s a stage that every athlete, whichever country he or she may be from, wants to be in,” says Dutee. “We go to a temple to request God to give us what we want. The Olympics is also a temple where we go for a medal. The only difference is that with God, you just have to ask; at the Olympics, you have to fight for a medal,” Dutee says. She has already won the fight of her life. Medal or no medal, she will always be a trailblazer.

“We go to a temple to ask God for what we want. Olympics is also a temple where we go for a medal. The only difference is with God, you just have to ask, at the Olympics, you have to fight.”