An Express Investigation: For the last couple of months, 15 reporters gathered data about all of India's Asian Games medallists in Hangzhou. The analysis provided a few clear-cut trends and some fascinating journeys of athletes that highlight those. *98 Number of athletes who had access to academies to take their first step Nothing covers India better than the monsoon and the railways. Sporting academies would perhaps come next—not modern or state-of-the-art as those in urban centres or state-run, but those enough to ignite the fire and shape the early days of an athlete. Like the canoeing and kayaking academies in Roorkee, an industrial town founded by the British to produce spare parts for ships, on the banks of Ganges Canal in the 19th century, 30km from Haridwar. It’s where Arjun Singh, the Asian Games medallist in men's double canoe 1000m, first fell in love with the sport. He reached Roorkee when he was six, after his father threw his mother, brother and him out of their house in Baghpat's Dhikoli village. The mother packed their bags to Roorkee, where her brother, who worked with the Indian Army, lived. She found a job at a medicine factory with an income of Rs 8,000 a month. Life was difficult, recalls Arjun: “We live in a rented house. It was very difficult with her meagre income. My mother suffered a lot. But she did everything for both of us (he and his brother who works in UP Police).” Roorkee is a sporting backwater, the only claim to fame being the birthplace of India’s wicket-keeper batsman Rishabh Pant. Except for canoeing that is. Arjun’s uncle Ajit Singh was a canoeist and he enrolled his nephew into an academy when he was only ten. “It was scary, with all the equipment, to make the balance, but my uncle encouraged me a lot. He kept pushing me, and at the age of 14, I won a medal in the junior category at Rudrapur, where coach sir (Mayank Thakur) saw me," he says. Thakur, a coach in Bhopal, had heard about Arjun from one of his students, who runs a club in Roorkee. “So I went to Rudrapur just to see whether the hype is real or not," says Mayank. It was worth the trip, and Thakur took Arjun under his wings and helped him get into the SAI centre in Bhopal. In three years, he made rapid strides to break into the national side, and eventually win a medal at the Asian Games. The medal has changed Arjun’s life. “She has stopped working. Things are improving, and we want her to have a good and peaceful life now. She has suffered a lot,” he says. The shift to Roorkee might feel less painful for his family now.
