Hari Chand – Greatest Indian athletes ever

The CCD’s tea hasn’t gone down well with Hari Chand. He makes a face but says in the given circumstances it would do. At the age of 65, he has two stents, lives with his wife Sheetal Kaur, who calls four times to check on him, in a rented house in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar. He has two sons and a daughter. The sons have their own homes while his daughter is married. Hari Chand retired as second-in-command in the CRPF. “Yes, I did have my own house,” he explains. “But I sold it to marry my daughter and gave the rest of the money to my sons to start their lives.”

There is a silence that stretches a bit before he smiles and says, “I wanted it that way. Nowadays, you will always hear these talks about children waiting for the elders to die so that they can…I didn’t want it that way. I wanted it my way. To live on my own terms. I visit my children and they visit me. And God has given me a guarantee that he will feed me.”

It is this absolute confidence in his running and in his maker that made him break the barrier of 29 minutes at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. “I knew there was no medal,” he says. “But if I am there among the best in the world, I will break my own personal record at least.” Hari Chand ran without spikes on the Montreal tartan track and clocked 28:48. In fact, he ran barefoot. In the middle of the pack with the great Finnish runner Lasse Viren leading. Those were the days of Dick Quax, Rod Dixon and Brendan Foster. All of them tall athletes. Viren who won the 1976 gold in 5000m and 10,000m was 5’11’.

“I think I was too short,” says Hari Chand. But then with a smile, says, “So was Miruts Yifter.” In the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Yifter, the great Ethiopian runner, won the 5000m and 10,000m double gold. Yifter was around 5’3”. More than the height, the difference was in the training methods. Lasse Viren had spent time training in the high-altitude of Kenya.

Back from Montreal, Hari Chand set his sights on the 1978 Asian Games in Bangkok. It was a cinder track and with a pacesetter in the form of Harjit Singh, he won a double gold in the 5000m and 10,000m. It was an amazing feat which catapulted him into the rare group of athletes, who have won two gold medals at a single Asian Games. The boy from Hoshiarpur had come good. He still remembers being surrounded at the Palam airport with the Custom officials jokingly referring to his bringing back ‘excess gold.’

In today’s athletic world, where science and technology is being melded to observe running patterns, where even a heel-strike on the track is analysed like the rocks on Mars, Hari Chand, has his own advice. “No point in giving crores after an athlete wins a medal,” he says. “Let the government spend crores on his training ensuring that he wins the medal. After winning, he would anyway, be rich.”

Hari Chand was running beautifully in 1981, as he trained in Germany. His sights were set on the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi and he wanted the double of 5000 and 10,000 yet again. Viral fever struck around six months before the Games taking away training time, reducing his weight. “I knew it was over,” he says — sadness still lingers on as he looks towards the Nehru Stadium. “I didn’t even watch the Games. I just left for Neemuch and joined training at the CRPF.”

What he leaves unsaid is that after the 1976 Olympics, Hari Chand had an offer from the University of Nevada to come on an athletics scholarship. “I couldn’t speak English and I didn’t know where Nevada was,” he says. “They pursued me till 1980 and then gave up.”

Today, athletes are trailed by a team of scientists, nutritionists, engineers, wear biofeedback sensors, delivering mega-tonnes of data. Hari Chand injected himself with optimism, ran on courage and simply persevered to be one of the all-time greats.