India’s Harmilan Bains celebrates her second-place finish to win the silver medal in the women’s 800-meter final at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China.
| Photo Credit: FILE PHOTO
At the closing ceremony of the SFA Championships held at the Dravid-Padukone Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, international track athlete Harmilan Bains held court. Harmilan, who won silver medals in the 800m and 1500m events at the 2022 Asian Games, spoke about her early days in sports, the added pressure of being from a sporting family, and her journey to the top.
You come from a sporting family in which both of your parents are professional athletes. Did that add pressure when you began your journey?
Yes, it was a lot of pressure when I started off. Athletics and sports were a vital part of my childhood since I was in the third grade. ‘Just get me a medal in the Asian Games’ was a phrase I heard often around my house.
My mother, as you know, won a medal at the Asian Games in 2002 and she wanted me to do the same as well, repeating history. So I decided to give them two medals! There was a lot of questioning done by my parents when my training sessions did not go to plan, and it was very difficult to answer these questions. According to me, the added pressure gives me a boost to achieve more milestones.
What do you think about the opportunities that upcoming talent in India receive, in contrast to the opportunities you had when you started off? How important do you think these platforms and championships are for the next generation of athletes?
When I started in sports, I had a basic idea because I come from a sporting family. But the children and the adults in my village did not have an idea about what I was doing. I think these kind of platforms nowadays are great as children are educated from their school age. Look at what China is doing. They take talent with potential from the school level and hone their skills from the second or third grade. Our nation needs more of these kinds of platforms to produce many more athletes. When sports is strong, the nation is strong.
Social media plays a huge part in people’s lives nowadays, especially if you are a sportsperson with a fan following. How will you suggest maintaining a balance between the two?
Balancing this is not as difficult as people think it is. If you want to perform at the top level of sports, you have to follow a sense of timing in whatever you do. I fix my timings for social media and do not exceed that. I also tend to do shoots and other commercial activities only when it is off-season.
This is the time when sportspeople increase their mileage. As I am a middle-distance runner, I do long training sessions four times in a week, and pursue my other interests at other times, which include social media, travelling and shoots.
When the mid season comes, I cut off all these other hobbies, which might leave people thinking that there are different ‘Harmilans’ in the off and mid-season.
