20 kg lighter, mum Deepika Kumari’s baby steps to Paris

Vinayak Padmadeo

New Delhi, July 19

Deepika Kumari knows she must keep calm. In precision sports such as archery, the sudden throb of the heart can make you miss the target.

Deepika must stay calm, as her husband and coach, archer Atanu Das, reiterates. “All she has to do now is to keep her calm. She knows what it takes, so it is a matter of keeping out all distractions, concentrating on one arrow at a time,” Atanu says.

For a top athlete, distractions are impossible to avoid — injury, form and pressure can break career. As if that’s not enough, Deepika put on the mantle of motherhood, too, giving birth to a girl in November 2022. This added yet another layer of challenge in her quest to win an Olympics medal. Deepika has been around forever, and she’s already a veteran of three Olympic Games, but she’s only 30 — Paris is possibly her final chance to win an Olympics medal, the hopes of which she raised by becoming a junior world champion in 2009. Paris seemed a far dream when Deepika was pregnant. Pregnancy and childbirth, the physical and psychological changes they induced, challenged Deepika to such an extent that she decided to quit the sport. She teetered on the brink before the love of the sport brought her back to the field.

“And so, she was soon itching to get back and start shooting arrows,” says Atanu, who had a difficult time holding Deepika back from the practice arena, until she regained fitness and strength — shedding 20 kg in the process.

It was tough. With her strength all but gone, Deepika could not hold her bow when she started on the comeback trail last year. To get her confidence back, Atanu, who took over as her personal coach, had to reduce the poundage — the tension — of her bowstring. “She had lost her strength,” says Atanu. So he made Deepika shoot from only five metres — the distance in the Olympics is 70 mt.

The poundage — or draw weight of the string — varies between 30 and 48 pounds in competitions, depending on the strength of the archer. In Deepika’s case, it was just a fraction of that. The shooting distance was gradually increased to 10 mt, then 20 and finally to the competition standard, 70 mt.

But the real work was to get her in prime fitness — which took a good part of one full year. As she was getting back into shape, she regained her place in the core group of the country’s top eight shooters — but then she suffered a big blow. She failed to earn a place for the Hangzhou Asian Games. That broke her. Atanu says: “With tears in her eyes, she told me: ‘I cannot do this. It is all over for me and I will never pick up a bow ever’. I had to calm her down.”

Deepika, too good to be lost, too good to be overwhelmed by the new kids on the block, got a lifeline at the National Games in Goa last year when she won three medals. “That gave her great confidence, and she thought she was back,” Atanu says.

Participating in elite sport while bringing up a baby is a struggle, and the couple had to make a harsh decision — now baby Vedika is in their Kolkata home with her grandparents.

Bringing up the baby had been tough. “Vedika had to be fed regularly, and her sleep pattern meant that after a day in the sun or wind, practising, we got no rest at all,” says Atanu. “As a result, training got affected, mental and physical fatigued kicked in.”

The couple somehow managed to cope and punch the ticket to Paris. “It is tough we both have a career and sometimes we forget that we have a toddler in our home,” Atanu, 32, says. “Even now we are apart. I am training in Pune while Deepika is in Paris, and we have to video-call Vedika daily. The moment we see her, we forget all our struggles.

“Since I am a regular caller, our baby is a little more attached to me at the moment — this irks Deepika a bit! Only recently, she was complaining that she had the baby in her womb for nine months, but Vedika is only interested in her baba,” he adds with a chuckle.

Fourth time lucky?

While Deepika has made a great comeback, the challenge that confronts her is very intimidating — she has to break the Olympic jinx.

Deepika, who has been to three consecutive Olympics — London 2012, Rio de Janeiro 2016 and Tokyo 2020 — has had a sorry tryst with the Summer Games. She exited in the first round in London; in Rio she lost in the Round of 16; and in Tokyo, she lost in the quarterfinals of both individual and mixed team events. Deepika says she wanted desperately to represent India one more time at the Olympics — maybe at Paris, the long quest for an Olympics medal would end in success.