Press Trust of India
New Delhi, June 26: In a country where winning an Olympic medal is a rarity and bagging two in a row a distant dream, India’s lone double-Olympic medallist Sushil Kumar has revealed that he was advised to ‘bow out on a high’ after his bronze-medal feat at the 2008 Beijing Games.
In a book titled ‘My Olympic Journey’, Sushil recalled that despite suggestions of calling it quits after the Beijing Olympics, he chose to stay on as he felt ‘it was the start, not the end’, and eventually managed to better the colour of his medal four years later at the London Games in 2012.
“I returned to India (after Beijing Games) and was told by my well-wishers to bow out on a high and retire. I was flabbergasted. After all these years, I had finally realised what it meant to be an Olympic medallist and what was needed to achieve that goal. It was only after winning the Olympic bronze that I grasped the finer points of wrestling, such as how to hold an opponent, various techniques and strategies for different fights. It was the start, not the end.
“I began to build up my game with even more rigour and passion, and the results soon followed,” Sushil revealed in a book. The 33-year-old legendary wrestler disclosed that initially he could not understand the magnitude of winning an Olympic medal when he had first bagged it at Beijing.
“I frankly did not understand the magnitude of what I had just achieved. I wasn’t aware till then that a 52-year jinx on Indian wrestling had been ended with my medal. But the true worth of the medal was realised only when I came home,” he added.
