Until they joined Army, sports was not on the minds of these winners

Before he enlisted in the Indian army in 2016, Arvind Singh had never heard of the sport of rowing.

At the Hangzhou Asian Games, the 27-year-old Arvind combined with Arjun Lal Jat to bring home a silver medal in the lightweight double sculls event.

“I joined the army in 2016, following in my elder brother’s footsteps. Back then, I had never heard of the sport, let alone try it back home. When I enlisted in the army, a coach noticed my height and asked me to try out for the rowing team. Since then, I have been a rower,” recollects the six-foot-one-tall Arvind who hails from the Khabra village of Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district.

Just like the 27-year-old Arvind, who is currently a Subedar, all the other 16 rowers who returned from Hangzhou with a medal had never participated in the sport before they joined the army. Most of them come from farming families with no real link to any sport, much less a niche sport like rowing.

Unlike athletes in other disciplines, the rowers didn’t take up the sport as a pathway for a government or a public sector job. Their destinies as rowers were shaped after they had joined the army — at the Army Rowing Node in Pune, where they were handpicked based on physical attributes like their wiry and lanky frames.

Besides the five medals (two silvers, three bronze and a couple of fourth-place finishes) that India won in rowing, two other Indian medallists from the Hangzhou 2023 contingent were also introduced to their discipline in the army: Avinash Sable, who claimed a men’s 3,000m steeplechase gold and a men’s 5,000m silver and Gulveer Singh, who won a bronze in the men’s 10,000metre race.