Read more about With Lovlina’s bronze, women have won 7 of India’s last 9 Olympic medals on Business Standard. Despite the achievements, women’s sport remains neglected, underfunded in the country
“When I was boxing, these goals didn’t exist,” Pranamika Bora says. Bora, a boxer who represented India at multiple World Championships and the Commonwealth Games, now works as a coach at Sports Authority of India (SAI) National Boxing Academy in Rohtak, Haryana. “We didn’t even dream of the Olympics,” she laughs, because the event wasn’t even part of the programme. “Growing up, it was tough as a girl to justify getting into boxing,” she says. “Your parents didn’t want you getting into a sport where you get hit in the face. No meant fewer eyeballs, fewer jobs and less funding…. It’s not like today.” Nothing really is. Roll back the tape seven decades to see where we have come from. Four women — Arati Saha, Mary D’Souza, Nilima Ghosh and Dolly Nazir — were part of a 64-member contingent to go to the 1952 in Helsinki. They were the first women to represent India at that stage. D’Souza, the oldest of the quartet, is 90 now, living in Atlanta with her daughter, spending her time playing whist and watching as much of the as she can on TV. “I had talent, but no money,” she recalls without a hint of resentment in her voice. “The pressure was to get money to pay my way to the Games. There were obviously no advertisements and endorsements.” Sixty-nine years on, in Tokyo, at the hallowed Ryōgoku Kokugikan, the temple of sumo wrestling where women aren’t allowed, Lovlina Borgohain won India’s third medal at the 2020 Games. Her doing so means women have won seven of India’s last nine medals at the Olympics — a run that coincidentally stretches back exactly nine years, to August 4, 2012, when Saina Nehwal won a badminton bronze. August 4, 2012 was a big day for another big reason. It was the day, Bora insists, that women boxing in India changed forever – with MC Mary Kom’s debut at the Olympics. Later that same year, in a dusty hall at the Barpathar Girls High School in Assam, the renowned SAI boxing coach Padum Boro spotted the girl. Tall, lean and wiry, the teenager was training Muay Thai at the school, which gave her the movement and footwork necessary to negotiate the art of the ring.
