BY MANPREET SINGH
We have been on a heady emotional roller coaster over the past 24 hours, having bottled up emotions for a long time and focusing on Olympic excellence.
Delightfully for us, the Olympic Games bronze medal in Tokyo on Thursday for the men’s team and a famous fourth-place finish for the women’s squad has got the entire nation ecstatic about hockey.
Prime Minister Shri. Narendra Modiji’s words of encouragement before we left for Tokyo and his personal call immediately after we won the bronze medal touched our hearts.
There can be no greater motivation than that, no better reward for the hard work turned in by the players, coaches and support staff who had a common goal — Olympic glory.
In this journey, many have made significant contributions — the Government of India, Government of Odisha and the Hockey India leadership have worked together to ensure the very best for a team that was preparing for the Olympics in the middle of a raging pandemic.
Yes, the time is right to look back at all that went into bagging a medal after 41 long years.
It was the beginning of March 2020. The Sports Ministry had foreseen the COVID-19 outbreak and prepared us well for a lockdown on March 10, nearly a fortnight before the National lockdown was announced.
At first, it was hard to understand but with time and as news of the rapid spread of the pandemic became known, we realised the effectiveness of this timely decision.
As the teams stayed inside the campus of SAI Bengaluru, cut away from the outside world, we developed amazing camaraderie which actually helped to strengthen the team performance manifold.
It may never be known that when we resumed training, the turf was becoming slippery as the maintenance staff was not in the campus.
No sooner had our coaches flagged this with the authorities, a small army of committed staff members, many of them unaccustomed to such laborious work, found a variety of brushes and cleaned the turf for us to practice.
There was none of the bureaucracy that many associate with Indian sport. There was just one thought that dominated the campus — Facilitate the athletes to ensure their excellence.
And when we returned to our home base after a break, the COVID-19 protocols were followed to the T.
We had to spend two weeks in isolation, but everything that we needed was provided for in our own rooms.
Our training was resumed in groups, with the coaching staff also divided to ensure that we would have enough resources in any eventuality.
Hockey India got the junior players to provide us match practice ahead of the Olympics at a time when we were unable to travel abroad.
It helped that SAI had tied up with a hospital in the vicinity in case any of us needed hospitalisation.
Suffice to say, we knew that we would be well looked after.
I experienced it first-hand and when Surender Kumar had to be admitted after developing post-COVID issues, we were concerned but knew that it would not be long before he would be back with us.
In December 2019, the entire team was inducted into the Target Olympic Podium Scheme, a scheme meant usually for single athletes, to ensure that we got consistent support over and above the all-year-round funding for training and competition.
Such crucial interventions have been catalysts that pushed our team forward.
The players and the coaching staff have basked in the limelight of the achievement, but we have a lot to be thankful to all the unnamed staff in the National Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru.
Make no mistake, the campus is not just another place where a National camp is held.
It has come to be our spiritual home, one that the hockey teams will cherish forever.
(Manpreet Singh has been the captain of India men’s national field hockey team since May 2017. He led the Indian field hockey team to win the bronze medal at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.)