8 girls from 3 varsities bag 4 golds
Rabindra Sarobar:
Three hours of paddling before class and three hours in the evening, year after year, brought gold and silver for eight city girls representing their universities at a rowing championship in Chandigarh last week.
Teams from Jadavpur University (JU), Calcutta University (CU) and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Open University of Technology (MAKAUT) bagged golds in four categories – 2,000m fours, 500m and 2,000m heavyweight single scull and 2,000m lightweight – besides two silver and three bronze medals.
Rowing rivalry between university teams has a rich history, the most famous being The Boat Race – an annual contest between rowing crews from Oxford and Cambridge universities on the Thames.
The boat races on Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh earlier this month lived up to the legendary competitive spirit of the London races. One of the closest races was the 2,000m heavyweight women’s fours, in which the JU team finished just 1.5 seconds ahead of Punjab University.
“It was a wonderful feeling to beat the Punjab University team. It’s basically the same girls who participate in the national and the inter-university championships. They are a very strong team and we have a rivalry going. So, the win was special,” said Semanti Choudhury, who is doing her MSc in economics at JU.
Semanti and her team mates, as well as the girls from CU and MAKAUT start rowing in the Dhakuria Lakes at 5.30 every morning. The morning practice session goes on till 8.30am. In the evenings, they practise in boats or work out on rowing simulators at a rowing club.
The girls happily turn away from hanging out with friends as it interferes with their training schedule. “It’s easily 9.30pm by the time I can open my books. I study till midnight and the next morning I am at the club for practice,” Shramana Saha, a first-year English honours student at JU and part of the winning team in Chandigarh. “I have no social life and all my friends have come to accept that. Staying up late is not an option either.”
The other two girls in the the team were the Brahmachari sisters – Shreyaa and Shweta.
Aishwarya Krishnan, a BCom student of St Xavier’s College who won a gold in 2,000m, a silver in 500m lightweight single scull and a bronze, will soon start preparing for the National Games to be held in Goa in November.
For Mayurakshi Mukherjee, a student of electronics and communication engineering student at the Heritage Institute of Technology under MAKAUT, it has always been motivating to get recognition for the hard work put in.
“We practise hard all year, through rain and shine,” said the winner of a bronze for India in 2015. She won the 2,000m and 500m golds in the single scull heavyweight category in Chandigarh.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Rita Basu / March 27th, 2018