“The difference between the impossible and possible lies in determination.”
— Carl Lewis.
This is just one of the inspiring quotes one can read when they enter Athletic Coaching Camp in Sodepur, an institute founded and run by Kuntal Roy since 1969.
Some may recognise Roy as a footballer, some may recognise him as the former athletics chief coach of the Sports Authority of India (SAI), and others may not even have heard his name at all.
Roy won the Dronacharya Award in 2011, and since then he has preferred to remain out of the spotlight. Roy believes, “If you do good work the spotlight will come to you on its own; instead of you running towards recognition.”
“The media has been very kind to me and it has always been them coming to me rather than me running behind them for coverage. I have been training athletes since 1969 and my happiness comes through the success of my kids,” said Roy.
Athletic Coaching Camp started in 1969, with eight to 10 refugee kids
How did it all start?
Kuntal Roy was just 17 when he started the Athletic Coaching Camp in Sodepur. You might wonder why a 17-year-old would get into coaching instead of playing the sport. He wanted to be a footballer, but one day when he was attempting to score a goal, he fell and twisted and broke his ankle. “The doctors told my parents: Your son had a tumour in his ankle that we can treat now because his leg is broken. If it went undetected, we would have had to chop off his leg when he turned 25,” said Roy.
Recalling those early days, he told of some juvenile Bangladeshi refugees, who tried to steal his Adidas football, but didn’t know how to really play the sport. “I went and confronted them and asked them what they wanted the ball for. They said they just wanted to play, but didn’t know how. I saw they were malnourished, but they had the will to play, so I told them I’ll teach them,” Roy said. That’s how Athletic Coaching Camp started in 1969, with eight to 10 refugees who just wanted to play.
From training them to renting out a small kitchen in the vicinity for Rs 5 a month, which was to be their club room, Athletic Coaching Camp began on a muddy field in Sodepur. From there, it has grown to a place where 200 children of various age groups come and practice the different disciplines of athletics.
The club’s grounds
How does it work? What disciplines are catered to?
Every year, in the first week of February, would-be athletes come and put their names on a trial list. Trials start as early as five years old and go all the way up to senior levels. The monthly fee is Rs 250 now, and until Covid hit, it was just Rs 100 a month. Trials are conducted to see if the individual has a spark for athletics. Senior athletes joining have to show that they are rank holders at the state or national level in their disciplines.
With two small pits for long jump and triple jump, there is also a high jump mat for high jump and pole vault. From 100m to 110m hurdles, all the way to steeple chase and heptathlon, there isn’t an athletic discipline that is not catered to.
“We don’t have a large enough space to train all the athletes together. I have eight coaches who are all medal winners in their own disciplines. They take care of six different batches we have in a day.”
Long jump trials in progress
How does he monitor an athlete’s progress or understand if they have what is required at the international level? “We have a set up like no one else in Bengal. Here I have machines that nobody has. I have at least four GoPros that are used to record and monitor each athlete. We do this specially for athletes who we believe have the potential,” Roy said.
Athletic Coaching Camp uses technology extensively and maintains records of all their top performers. Having produced three Olympians, Roy said, “If you want to know how Sanjay Rai or Soma Biswas prepared for the Sydney Olympics or an Asian Games I can tell you exactly what they did because we maintain all the records.”
The club makes the best use of its limited space
The Dronacharya Award, his top athletes and the future
In 2011, Roy won the Dronacharya Award for the performance of his trainee Sushmitha Singha Roy, a heptathlete in the three years leading up to 2011. However, he feels that he had met the criteria much earlier. Roy said, “The Drona is given to coaches whose athletes have shown consistent results not in one year, but three years consecutively. If that is the criteria I had met it earlier. In 2000, I had not one but two Olympians, both of whom performed well for three years till 2003, so I feel it was delayed by eight years.”
Having produced three athletes who turned Olympians with two being heptathletes Soma Biswas, Sushmitha Singha Roy and long jumper Sanjay Kumar Rai, Roy believes that he can churn out even more stars, but feels that the system is broken. Apart from the Salt Lake Stadium and SAI’s facilities, no other centre has a synthetic running track and the SAI facilities are almost inaccessible. “Look at any state, they have a minimum of 30 synthetic tracks, but not Bengal.”
Roy provides everything an athlete needs — from facilities to train and a gym with all the essentials for strength and conditioning, to a nutritionist who provides the right supplements for each athlete and several testing machines, which determine if the athlete has recovered from the last session.
‘Athletics has no future if no one invests. I have done all of this myself because I love doing it. Not out of some obligation,’ said Roy
How can Bengal’s sporting future be bright when there are no facilities, and athletes looking to switch states? “Other states are far ahead. An athlete, who is ready to move to the next level will always want to train somewhere like Bengaluru instead of Kolkata. We have no investment and interest here, be it from corporations or the government. I don’t blame them. Cricket, and then football, are the real money-minting machines. Athletics has no future if no one invests. I have done all of this myself because I love doing it. Not out of some obligation. Investing in athletics could feel like an obligation to most, but not to me,” he signed off.