NEW DELHI, June 26: In a country where winning an Olympic medal is a rarity and bagging two in a row a distant dream, India’s lone double-Olympic medallist Sushil Kumar has revealed that he was advised to “bow out on a high” after his bronze-medal feat at the 2008 Beijing Games.
In a book titled ‘My Olympic Journey’, Sushil recalled that despite suggestions of calling it quits after the Beijing Olympics, he chose to stay on as he felt “it was the start, not the end”, and eventually managed to better the colour of his medal four years later at the London Games in 2012.
“I returned to India (after Beijing Games) and was told by my well-wishers to bow out on a high and retire. I was flabbergasted. After all these years, I had finally realized what it meant to be an Olympic medallist and what was needed to achieve that goal. It was only after winning the Olympic bronze that I grasped the finer points of wrestling, such as how to hold an opponent, various techniques and strategies for different fights. It was the start, not the end.“I began to build up my game with even more rigour and passion, and the results soon followed,” Sushil revealed in a book co-authored by journalists Digvijay Singh Deo and Amit Bose.
The 33-year-old legendary wrestler disclosed that initially he could not understand the magnitude of winning an Olympic medal when he had first bagged it at Beijing.
Although Sushil lost out on a gold at London, he feels fortunate to have climbed the podium at the Olympics twice.
“I could not perform to my expectations in the final and was comprehensively beaten. I was disappointed at losing out on the gold, but I knew that on that day, it was the best I could do. As I stood on the Olympic podium again, I was satisfied.
Sushil believes that the London Games, where the country bagged six medals, broke the cynicism that Indian athletes are satisfied with just participating in the Olympics.
