Sarita Chourey, 21, wakes up at 5:30 every morning to train for an hour before heading out to class at Mata Jijabai Government Girls P.G. College, Indore. In the evening, she trains for another hour — a regular feature in the life of any sportsperson, except, Sarita has been blind from birth, and her two older sisters, Jyoti and Pooja are visually impaired too. While Sarita won a bronze at the 2019 Commonwealth Judo Championship for the visually impaired in the U.K. last year, her sisters, who inspired her, are also judoists and national bronze medalists.
The daughter of a labourer father and homemaker mother from Hoshangabad, M.P., Sarita is the fourth among six children. In school she enjoyed dancing, singing, running and judo, but she wanted to take up sport seriously.
Sightsavers India, an NGO that works for those with visual impairment, organises training in judo and self-defense, and it is through them that she started: “I learnt self-defense under the Sightsavers’ social inclusion programme in 2017,” recalls Sarita, adding that this made her realise she wanted to take up judo to the next level.
Sarita Chourey
“With judo I can be [in]dependent and always protect myself,” she says. After she won her first bronze medal in the 44 kg juniors category at the 2018 National Blind and Para Judo Championships (NBPJC), she says, “People motivated me, saying they wanted me to keep winning medals.” She went on to win a silver in the 28 kg category in the same event last year.
Instructors use both physical touch and sound during training. “First they speak and then teach me practically to grip the person and throw them,” says Sarita. “In practice sessions, the coach just calls out the name of the throws and my partner and I perform them.”
Her coach Bhagwan Das, who is the General Secretary of the Madhya Pradesh Blind and Para Judo Championship, says that learning a sport “requires a lot of stamina, skill, hard work, focus and willpower — and Sarita has all these qualities.”
In her second year of B.A. now, Sarita hopes to get a government job once she completes the programme. “People appreciate that I am doing well. They say, ‘We want to do the same.’ I just advise [them] to keep working hard, no matter what field they choose,” she says. Currently, she is working towards the 2020 NBPJC and dreams of qualifying for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
