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When Nadia girl Debashree Mazumdar got selected as a member of the women’s 4x400m that will take the field in Rio de Janeiro early on Saturday, the district’s Olympic athletics baton passed to her from Soma Biswas, one of India’s most illustrious athletes. With two Asian Games silver medals, an Asian Games 4x400m relay gold and an Asian Athletics Championship gold, the two-time Olympian is one of the most decorated too.
The 39-year-old heptathlon star, who hails from Mandal Pukuria village, about 10km from Ranaghat station, stays in an apartment just off the Bypass in Beliaghata, diagonally across the road from the stadium where she trained for over a decade at the Sports Authority of India complex.
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The youngest of the Biswas siblings — five sisters and a brother — Soma comes from a family owning agricultural land. “But my brother used to play kabadi and one of my sisters was into athletics.” Her first coach was her sister’s classmate Biren Bhaumik. “He himself used to run 100m and coached us on the side.” Soma had started off with high jump, representing her school Sarisadanga Dr Shyamaprasad High School at the school national meet in Delhi where she came seventh.
The turning point came when she applied for a sports stipend in response to a Port Trust of India advertisement. At Port Trust, she was noticed by Subhroja Roy, wife of her eventual coach and mentor Kuntal Roy who was with SAI. It was Kuntal who chose heptathlon as the sport for Soma. “My basic speed was not good enough for me to excel in any one event. But I had the stamina and the build to take the workload that heptathlon demands,” she says.
Heptathlon for women includes seven events — 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m, long jump, javelin throw and 800m — and was introduced in the 1984 Olympics. “Javelin throwing is my favourite event.”
Soma started at SAI in 1994, travelling by train daily from Ranaghat. Then in 1995, she became a boarder at the SAI hostel.
The result was immediate. She won gold at the Asian Junior Athletics Championship in Delhi in 1996.
Golden dreams
When Soma left for Sydney for her first Olympic Games in 2000, the only international experiences she had had were a junior and a senior Asian Track & Field events. “I must say I was overawed. We were used to running in empty stadiums. Suddenly the stands were full and people were shouting and making waves, as if they could read each other’s minds. The weather was different. And Kuntal sir wasn’t there.”
She points out how lonely it can get for an athlete in the absence of one’s personal coach. “When there is no one with you for your warm up and training, even a sportsman gets rattled.”
The only company she had was fellow athlete Saraswati Saha from Bengal, who had trained under the national coach.
She came 23rd. “Ami besh dheriechhilam,” she smiles sheepishly.
From home, there was troubling news. “In fact, for days there was no news.” In the pre-mobile phone and WhatsApp days, they had to depend on the infrequent calls allowed from landlines. “It was only after I managed to contact my aunt in Kalyani that I was told about the floods. Our house and fields were inundated but my family was safe, she told me.”
But the Games experience otherwise was memorable. “It was my first Olympic. Sydney was such a green and clean city. The Games Village was like a meeting point for the entire sporting world. The dining hall used to stay open 24 hours. You could walk in to find someone having a heavy meal at 3am. The reason would be it was lunchtime in the part of the world where he came from. The dining hall served all kinds of food from everywhere. We could regularly have rice, dal, sabzi and roti.”
Ironically, she would fare much better four years later in the Athens Olympics but her position would improve only to 22nd.
“We saw that place with pillars that I had read about in my childhood in the history books,” she says about Parthenon.
Medal musings
She hung up her shoes in 2008 at the end of a 16-year illustrious career. “My only regret is the 800m in the Busan Asiad. It was the last event of heptathlon and I was at the bronze medal position till then. Had I listened to my coach and gone all out 50m earlier, the gold was within my reach. But I played safe to hang on to my silver medal position. There was just 12 points between me and the champion. In heptathlon that’s negligible,” she says, shaking her head.
Soma is now an office-going mother of two — elder son Samudra is seven and plays football at the Bidhannagar Corporation Sports Academy facility in IB Park while the younger one, Saamridhha, is just two months old.
The Arjuna awardee can sometimes still be spotted by the SAI tracks where she trained for over a decade, giving tips to athletes. But not as often as she would have preferred.
“The office hours are strict. It is difficult to be here except on holidays,” says the Eastern Railway employee, keeping an eye over two Nadia athletes limbering up. That she is eager to give back to sports is apparent from the fact that she has done a coaching course and used to voluntarily give lessons at SAI. Till the office hours came in the way.
It is difficult to imagine how the soft-spoken village girl made it this far till one mentions the recent comment by Shobhaa De about players going to the Olympics to click selfies. “Why doesn’t she try and do the same? I doubt if she had bothered to tweet a good luck message earlier,” she flares up. And you know what fire is in that five foot eight inch frame.
Sudeshna Banerjee
saltlake@abpmail.com