Amid personal tragedies, a golden start for Ankita, Sathiyan
The feeling hadn’t quite sunk in. Or so it seemed from the sidelines of the Pandit Dindayal Upadhyay Stadium in Surat. Ankita Das and G Sathiyan had just won the gold in the mixed doubles final of the 20th Commonwealth Table Tennis Championship. For Das, she had set a record by becoming the first Indian woman to win the yellow metal in the 44 years of the tournament’s history. Yet her reaction was comparatively sombre. The hi-fives and wide smiles did eventually happen, but all after the 22-year-old looked up to the heavens, and silently dedicated her win to her recently deceased father.
A couple of months before the Siliguri-resident travelled to Surat for the event, she was plying her trade in the Spanish professional league. “Many players look for opportunities to play in the European leagues, and I was lucky to have gotten one,” she states. She had managed to secure a short-term playing contract with table tennis club Linares. But just a month into the sojourn, she got a call from her mother asking her to return home to help take care of her ailing father. “Mom didn’t tell me that he had already passed away. She didn’t want me to be upset while travelling back home,” recalls Das, as she clutches the gold medal.
It had been the second sombre journey when she headed back home. Back in 2011, she had been offered a scholarship to train at the coveted Peter Karlsson academy in Sweden. “My dad had a serious blood-sugar problem. And he wasn’t too keen on letting me go alone,” she claims. Incidentally, the programme she had to go to Sweden for was to help her prepare for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Instead, she surprised the Indian contingent by securing qualification for the 2012 London Games, at the age of 18.
Meanwhile, as Das was on her way home, Sathiyan, who was in Guwahati at that point in time, knew about the tragic death. He had already prepared himself to make a condolence call. The phone call did happen and he tried his best to console her. Yet in a cruel twist of fate, he soon received a call on his own phone. One he didn’t quite expect. “It was my mom asking me to come home because my father had passed away,” he recalls, stony-faced. Sathiyan’s father had long been suffering from cancer and had finally succumbed to the disease.
Both players spent most of November in a state of mourning. Yet there was the upcoming tournament in Surat that tingled their minds. Especially the fact that neither had selected a partner to team up with for the mixed doubles event, which eventually turned out to be the reason for them to pair up. “This was the first time we’ve played as a pair together,” says Das. “And since we’ve won, it’s a 100% record for us,” she adds, smiling.
The ill-timing of their tragedies left the players starved of playing time together. In fact, the two met just two days before the matches started and spent a matter of just a few hours practising their strategies and technique. The only advantage they had was the fact that none of the other pairs had ever seen them play together as mixed doubles partners. “We knew how Soumyajit Ghosh and Mouma Das play. And that helped us when we played them in the final. But nobody knew our style. So that worked well for us,” explains Sathiyan.
Tactics essentially revolved around Das playing the aggressive role and Sathiyan keeping consistency. “That’s a bit new for mixed doubles. Normally you’d expect the guy to hit with more power and make the aggressive shots. But Ankita is very strong and took that role. It worked quite well for us,” he adds.
More than anything though, for both Das and Sathiyan, the victory serves as a morale booster. “This is the first time either of us have played in a tournament since our fathers died,” says Das, the 2013 senior national champion.
She, however, takes greater pride in her victory given that she has become the first Indian woman to win gold at the championship. The final-year MBA student explains how she’s always played for herself wherever she has gone. “This time, this one is for my dad. He got me into the game,” she says, softly.
As a five-year-old, Das was diagnosed with a digestion problem. Doctors encouraged physical activity to serve as a catalyst for recovery. That’s when her father encouraged her to take up the sport. “It started off just as a medicinal thing. By the time I got cured, I was hooked and my father had been encouraging me all the time,” she recalls.
An officer in the irrigation department, his death has left the post for Das’ mother to occupy. “It’s just the two of us now. But at least I’m earning through playing table tennis. It’s almost like my father prepared me to handle myself before he went,” she says, a small smile breaking through the frown.
