Where there is a will, there is a way

By Shamya Dasgupta

Shekar Veeraswamy and K Gopinath – made a few waves at the recent Malaysia Open and Bangkok Cup wheelchair tennis tournaments. In the Second Draw (for players without a world ranking) in Kuala Lumpur, Veeraswamy beat Gopinath in the final of the singles event and the two won the doubles final together. The duo then reached the doubles final of the Second Draw in Bangkok, before going down to a Taiwanese pair.
India has only barely woken up to the fact that people with disabilities play sports, quite seriously at that, and sometimes do much better at the Paralympics than their able-bodied counterparts do at the Olympics. There is a larger story here about the invisiblising of the lives and aspirations of people living with disabilities, but let’s return to the story of Gopi.

Till 2013, Gopi, who has a clubfoot, was playing para-badminton. Not in a wheelchair but standing up. All was going well. But in 2013, he had an accident, which left him with a fracture in his right leg.

“The doctors couldn’t use a plaster because of the nature of the fracture and told me it would heal by itself. I managed to walk after a while, but when I went back to practice, it hurt. The fracture didn’t heal at all,” Gopi tells us. “I had a bit of a setback. I took a break for a year. The level of competition
was too high; I couldn’t cope.”

At 30, Gopi decided to switch sports. “I had never used a wheelchair before, because I could walk by myself. And I had to start by cultivating the habit of moving the wheelchair, and it was quite a challenge, because you have to move manually and reach the ball.”

In terms of rules, the only major difference between the game Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play and the para-sport is that the ball is allowed to bounce twice on your side of the court. The other rules are the same. “The upper body should be strong. With badminton, the main focus is on the wrists. Here, it’s about the upper body, because you have to move the wheelchair and hit the ball on the move.”

Being in India, there wasn’t much by way of coaching when it came to wheelchair tennis, so Gopi, like others before him – including his partner Veeraswamy – turned to YouTube. And the two of them also visited South Africa.

He is certainly not the first – Boniface Prabhu, who takes part in the quad section and because of his condition uses a mechanised wheelchair, is India’s best-known para-tennis player. Like Gopi, he too has had to fend for himself. There are people in charge, federations and the like, but things are slack on that front (which is not restricted to para-sports).

“The kind of effort they put in is minimal,” says Gopi. “We went to South Africa at our own expense, because we wanted to learn the sport and promote it in India. We attended a lot of camps and learnt how to move the wheelchairs. We had zero knowledge before that.”

Gopi & Co persisted, and help came, though never as much as necessary. “Thankfully, the Karnataka State Lawn Tennis Association provides us a couple of courts over the weekends, and they also have wheelchairs that we can use. A few players have their own chairs. Paralympics Wheelchair Tennis Federation of India have helped us get some sponsors so we’ve been able to send batches for training to Bangkok, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. We
don’t get preference anywhere, but we do get a little bit by approaching people. At the end of the day, we can’t rely only on government for everything.”
In Gopi’s case, his position as a resource manager with Dell EMC, the computer data storage company, has been a great source of support also. “They gave me a better platform. People like me, we don’t always open up, but thoughts circle in the mind.”

That’s useful, because otherwise our engagement – including that of the officialdom – with para-sports is limited to tweeting oh- I’m-so-inspired messages when a Devendra Jhajharia breaks the javelin throw record at the Rio 2016 Paralympics, and taking selfies with Deepa Malik, the silver medalwinning shot putter from Rio. Sports associations across the spectrum need to wake up, providing at least the essential facilities every sportsperson deserves.

(Shamya Dasgupta is Senior Editor, Wisden India)