There is something about the Payyoli beach that stirs P.T. Usha. Some four decades ago, when she trained on the beach, not far from her home, a bunch of curious children would follow her every move. They had not seen a girl running in shorts before.
A few years later, Usha did something else that may have looked rather strange too. “I brought hurdles, all ten of them, to the beach and had my hurdling sessions very close to the water,” says Usha. “Those days, I trained on the beach for nearly three months every season with coach Nambiar. I used to run into the water, almost chasing the receding waves, and that was how I built up strength.”
Training on synthetic tracks. Photo: K. Ragesh
It’s a warm, sunny morning at Payyoli beach in Kerala’s Kozhikode district. Usha, now 54, is back at the water’s edge, and this time there is a bunch of young girls with her, hanging on to her every word. The girls run a series of 200m sprints and they train on a variety of terrain. Starting on the loose sand, they then move to the heavier, wet sands, and finally end their run splashing through the salty beach foam.
These seven girls are among Usha’s best students. There is quartermiler Jisna Mathew, 19, who has already been to the Olympics and the World Championships. Then there is Jessy Joseph, former 800m Asian junior silver medallist, who is back after a two-year injury break.
Despite the heavy training, which sort of simulates up-and-down running on the sandy slope, it is clear the girls are having fun. And there is a cool bonus at the end of it all: a nice swim. After the swim, the girls watch the catch brought in by the fishing boats. Jisna excitedly holds up a big fish, the best from the catch. “We enjoy our beach sessions very much,” she says. Jisna is the 400m Asian junior champion and senior Asian bronze medallist who helped India to the 4x400m relay gold at last year’s Bhubaneswar Asians.
Getting set for Doha
The girls are all part of the Usha School of Athletics, the coaching academy in Kinaloor, some 30 km from Payyoli. They have just begun preparing for the upcoming season. It promises to be a tough year, with the Asian Championships in April and the World Championships in September-October, both in Doha.
For Usha, every time she takes the girls to Payyoli beach, it is a walk down memory lane. During her prime, Usha was the Payyoli Express, the Golden Girl of Asian athletics, the track queen who would return with a handful of gold almost every time she went to the Asian Games or the Asian Championships. And she came very close to winning independent India’s first-ever Olympic medal in athletics, in the 400m hurdles, in 1984 at Los Angeles. She missed it by a whisker.
When she decided to start her own athletics academy in 2002, two years after hanging up her spikes, Usha’s plan did not seem too complicated: to produce another Usha, someone who would win an Olympic medal one day. And for the wide-eyed little girls who came to her academy for the annual selection trials, that was their dream too.
Beach sessions to build endurance. Photo: K. Ragesh
Tintu Luka
Many years ago, it was with such starry eyes that Tintu Luka landed up at the academy. It was then being run out of a rented place in Quilandy. “When I first came to Usha chechi ’s school, I was rather raw. My aim was to just retain my place at the centre because there was a weeding-out plan every year,” says Tintu. “Those days, Usha chechi used to train with us. That was so exciting, such a big motivation for us. I just wanted to stay here and train with her. As years went by, she motivated me to change my goals, to think big.”
This young, unsure girl went on to become Usha School’s best athlete. The national record holder in the 800m, the Asian Games silver medallist in Incheon, South Korea, in 2014, and the Asian champion in Wuhan, China, the next year. Tintu also went to the Olympics twice — to London in 2012, where she was a semifinalist, and to Rio in 2016. She also played a crucial part in the Indian 4x400m relay team, taking the 2014 Asian Games gold with a Games record.
“Tintu is the best I’ve produced and I strongly believed that she had the potential to win an Olympic medal. She was in such great form a few years ago and was progressing so well,” says Usha, who runs the academy along with husband V. Sreenivasan. “Jisna is my next best and I am sure Jessy (the 22-year-old two-lapper), will do very well in the future.”
Still, after 18 years of hard work — first in Quilandy, then from 2008 at the Kinaloor centre, which has a synthetic track and a full-fledged girls hostel — Usha has not seen that one medal she has longed for: the Olympic one. “Yes, I am not happy with the result. I still have the feeling that I have not found the girl who could be the next Usha,” she admits. “Even now, I’m looking for athletes who are a little more talented, who are able to focus better. But I have a feeling that if we can do things a little more systematically, one of these girls is capable of getting an Olympic medal.”
90 athletes
With almost every part of Kerala dotted with athletics academies, Usha is forced to pick her girls from nearer home; most of them are from Kozhikode or Kannur.
Usha has trained 90 athletes — almost all of them girls — during her long tenure as coach, and Tintu, now 29 and a chief reservation supervisor with the Railways in Kozhikode, is the only one who remains from the first batch. There are many new little girls, some as young as 11, who offer Usha hope.
Two tracks
Nestled in the hills that pop up at the end of a long, winding 6 km drive from Kinaloor, Usha’s academy is spread over 30 acres. The land was given to her by the Kerala government in 2008 on a 50-year lease. There are two training tracks, at two levels. One is a rustic grass-and-mud track surrounded by trees, while the other, on the upper level, is a synthetic track on a ground that appears to be carved out of the hills.
At Usha School of Athletics. Photo: K. Ragesh
When news spread that Usha was looking for support for her academy, many enthusiastic people came forward to help. The Kerala government developed the mud track, the Central government laid the eight-lane 400m synthetic track, while Olympic Gold Quest — which has Geet Sethi, Viswanathan Anand, Prakash Padukone and Viren Rasquinha on its board — donated gym equipment.
At Usha’s school, which has been given the status of a national camp, there are some 20 trainees, mostly girls, and two or three boys who double up as training partners for the fastest girls. The academy is still a work in progress. A new building, which will house the gym, is not yet finished. “It will be nice if we could have a swimming pool,” Usha says. “That will help my trainees immensely during the recovery phase.”
Darkest days
Life as a coach is a lot tougher than life as an athlete, and the hurdles are many. “It costs ₹60 lakh to run the show every year,” she says.
But the flow of support has thinned down considerably, especially after last year’s P.U. Chitra incident. Usha was the Central government’s observer for athletics then and although she had no active role in the Athletics Federation of India’s selection committee meeting to pick athletes for last year’s World Championships in London, there was a feeling that she had played a part in denying Chitra — Kerala’s Asian champion middle distance runner — a berth.
“I was unfairly blamed for something I had not done. Some local television channels ridiculed me, and it reached a point when I had to block the channels,” says Usha. “Those were the darkest days of my life, I felt very, very lonely. And my son even suggested that we move out of Kerala.” But she fought hard, her family supported her, and she was able to overcome the incident. But she lost a lot of her funding sources.
That was when crowd-funding came to her aid; she managed to raise some ₹28 lakh. “Now, a group from Malaysia has offered us ₹18 lakh while the Petroleum Board has promised us ₹10 lakh,” says Usha. But that will not be enough.
Usha could do with a little more support from the Athletics Federation of India, especially when it comes to exposure trips abroad for her trainees. When Tintu was at her best a few years ago, she did not get enough opportunities to race abroad before her major international meets. Running regularly in international meets could have helped her star trainees find their way out of the ‘box traps’ they frequently seem to fall into in major championships.
At the academy, the focus is on the 400m and the 800m. The scope for winning medals are best here, says Usha. She has high hopes for Sharika Shivakumar. “She joined a year ago, has got speed and endurance, and she is just 12. And Angel Silvia, who is 16, could be moulded into a fine sprinter,” says Usha.
Athletics is a tough world, but life can throw up a surprise or two when you least expect it. And Usha has her fingers crossed.
stan.rayan@thehindu.co.in
