Aheli Moitra
On June 27 this year, PT Usha turned 52. With her single minded dedication to athletics, she had painted a dream for young Indian women athletes—that we can also make it. As children, we listened to her stories of struggle as an ace athlete through poverty and discrimination, through the dredges of harsh athletic training and watched her tearing through the finish line with wide eyed admiration. All of us wanted to be PT Usha on the track. Most of us were disallowed from training to become ‘over successful’ sportswomen, lest we ‘destroy’ our bodies.
On June 25 this year, Dutee Chand, a 20-year-old sprinter from Odisha became the first woman after PT Usha to have qualified for the Olympics 100m event to be held in Rio de Janeiro in Brasil from August 5-21, 2016. On the day of qualifying rounds, she broke the women’s 100m sprint national record twice. Dutee said that qualifying for the Rio Olympics meant that “my dream has come true.”
t was indeed a dream for Dutee who was almost denied participation to the premier event two years ago. Hailing from a poor family of weavers, Dutee came to be a sprinter following in the footsteps of her sister Saraswati practicing on the banks of a river as they grew up. Having passed the hurdles of poverty, marginalization and sports politics, she had another major hurdle to jump. Her body was not ‘feminine enough’ for the International Association of Athletics Federation—muscles bulging, flat chest, strides massive—so they ran a ‘gender test’ on her. Born and brought up as a woman, she had to fit into how institutions defined a woman to be.
While she was found to be of the “right” gender, she is not the first woman to have her gender questioned for having a physical appearance that does not pander to the curves of the male gaze, and she will not be the last. Women in all professions have to look, walk, talk, laugh, sit, sneeze, burp, dress and run in the way that the male gaze, and the institutions it runs worldwide, approves.
“I feel it is wrong to change your body for sport participation. It is like in some societies where they used to cut off the hand of people caught stealing. I feel like this is the same kind of primitive, unethical rule. It goes too far,” said Dutee about the rules put on sportswomen by international sporting institutions.
Rightly said Dutee! And as women of a generation who dreamed of beating that 1/1000th of a second by tearing our hamstrings, making rock out of our abs or enduring nights of backaches—of becoming PT Usha and more—we hope you break every rule that defines the stereotypes of the world that reduce us to identities shaped by others. May our children dream of such a world thanks to sportspersons like you.
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