HANGZHOU: Sport is never only about triumphs on the field. It almost mandatorily requires one to go through pain, sometimes tribulations, or maybe a predicament or two, before one finds success. It’s the ‘other’ battle that matters as much, at times even more, before you knock on the door of success.
Sift Kaur Samra‘s gold medal at the Asian Gamesunderlines the dominance of India’s shooting campaign at the 19th Asian Games.The way she bossed the women’s 50m 3P final, leading from start to finish and topping the charts with a world record made some of the coaches from China tell their Indian counterparts: “You have been awesome at the Games.”
In fact, some have even been contacted by local news channels who are interested in knowing how the “well prepared” Chinese shooters have been given a tough time and pushed hard by the Indians at the firing point.
But sometimes, before conquering sporting battlegrounds, an athlete has to fight different battles and face questions which they either never expected to fight or have no answers for.
SIFT KAUR SAMRA
When Sift won her first senior medal at the ISSF World Cup in Bhopal earlier this year, her family, even her grandmother, was there to celebrate the moment. But little did anyone know that behind those smiles was a quandary that was pulling the family and Sift in different directions.
The World Cup bronze did provide a few answers to both, and the collective decision soon after that was to let Sift live the life of an elite sportsperson.
The Asian Games gold is, thus, both a relief and victory for the Samras.

(ANI photo)
Sift had to make a choice between pursuing MBBS and or continuing her career as a professional athlete. Such was her predicament that at the 2022 Cairo World Cup, it almost tore her apart.
“She broke down in Cairo,” a member of India’s coaching staff told TimesofIndia.com in Hangzhou. “Making a decision about which road you want to travel always helps. Doing two things at the same time doesn’t allow us to do even one of those the way you want to.

“In Sift’s case, she has really lifted her game after she made a choice. The record she has set will take some beating. It won’t be easy.”
Her total of 469.6 was 7.3 points ahead of China’s second-placed Zhang Qiongyue’s 462.3.
Understandably, she didn’t want to answer explicitly about the MBBS dilemma after that. “Ask my family” is what she had to say, while probably relaying an ‘I told you’ message to her loved ones back home.
ANUSH AGARWALLA
Dressage rider Anush Agarwalla too had a ‘battle’ of his own that he had to fight before he scripted history in Hangzhou, astride his trusted horse Etro.
Leading the charts for India in the team event of dressage, alongside Hriday Chheda, Divyakriti Singh and Sudipti Hajela, Anush first was part of a gold-medal winning quartet which ended a 41-year wait; and he then added a historic first individual medal for the country at the Asian Games in dressage — a bronze.
But it wasn’t as easy as the words make it sound six years ago.
When Anush moved to Germany as a 17-year-old boy studying in 12th standard, loneliness was his closest friend in foreign land, where an Indian teenager found himself out of place. And it was natural.

Somebody who had never lived alone was on his own, living with the tag of an outsider, to the extent of being mocked for his equestrian dreams.
Training under Olympic gold medallist Hubertus Schmidt in Germany, Anush would fly back and forth between Europe and India to take his board examinations, while many didn’t believe he could make it big in the sport.

“I made a lot of sacrifices in the sense that there were lots of days when I was alone, lots of nights when I could not sleep, which at that moment was very difficult to accept. But I never had regrets. Looking back, I am happy for everything I did, and that is what got me here,” Anush told TimesofIndia.com after his double-medal feat in Hangzhou.

(PTI photo)
“I was mocked a lot for my dreams because at that time I was nowhere at the (expected) level, or even close to achieving my (equestrian) dreams. Dealing with it was not easy at all.”
In reality, the battles fought behind the scenes are what make up their actual story of success, which makes their achievements even more special.
Anush and Sift are definitely not the only two who have fought such battles, but their stories add some perspective to what it takes off the field to become a champion on it.