Going the distance: Athlete Anju Bobby George on winning, and winning again

India’s greatest long-jumper has just been named Woman of the Year by World Athletics, for her achievements on and off the track. In particular, her work to spot, hone and train girls from across India to be track champions of the future.

A few months ago, in New Delhi, Anju Bobby George and her husband Robert Bobby George, stood beside 17-year-old Shaili Singh as she addressed the media for the first time. The youngster had just returned from the World Junior Athletics Championships in Nairobi with a silver medal in long-jump.

(Samuel Rajkumar / HT Photo)

Noticing that she was cold, George wrapped a shawl around the teen. It was a warm, parental gesture that spoke volumes for their bond, a bond George and her husband try to maintain with all the students enrolled at their free athletics academy for girls.

The care they take to identify youngsters with hidden talent, nurture that talent, and mentor and groom the children they enrol is part of the reason George, 44 — also India’s greatest long-jumper, and one of the biggest stars in Indian athletics history — was declared Woman of the Year by World Athletics (WA), track and field’s global governing body, earlier this month.

WA cited her active involvement in the sport and her work at the academy in its statement on the citation. “A constant voice for gender equality in her role as Senior Vice President of the Indian Athletics Federation, Bobby George also mentors schoolgirls for future leadership positions within the sport,” the statement went on to say.

Singh, for instance, has lived and trained with the Anju Bobby George Foundation academy since she was 13. The Georges spotted her potential at a series of domestic meets in 2017, and convinced her mother to let her leave Jhansi for Bengaluru.

The academy was set up in 2016, with funding from Sports Authority of India (SAI). It started with six students; there are now 13, all spotted by the Georges and all from economically weak backgrounds.

“Athletics is my passion and I wanted to give back to the sport that has given us so much,” George says, speaking to Wknd days after the WA honour. The aim with the young women, she says, is to mould them into champions. “But it is also important that they get a proper education, develop a good personality and life skills, so we also mentor and teach them about their roles as individuals in society.”

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Born in Changanacherry in Kottayam, Kerala, George built on her unique talent and her childhood love of running and jumping to excel at sports in school. At 26, she became the first Indian to win a medal at the World Athletics Championship (a bronze at the Paris edition of 2003). She remains the only Indian to have won a medal at these games.

She ruled the long jump at the Asian level for years, winning gold at the 2002 Asian Games, silver at the 2006 Asian Games, and bronze at the 2002 Commonwealth Games. At the 2004 Athens Olympics, she came teasingly close to becoming the first Indian to win a track and field medal, but finished fifth, despite pulling off a career-best jump of 6.83 metres (it remains the national record; India’s long wait for an Olympic medal in athletics finally ended this year, with Neeraj Chopra’s javelin gold).

From her performance in the field, no one would have guessed, but George revealed last year that she competed all her life with one kidney. She found out about this condition in 2001, and doctors advised her to end her athletics career, she said, but she decided to keep going.

What really hurt, she told Wknd, was an ankle injury she suffered at 18. “I cannot express in words how painful my career was. Sometimes, each step was like stepping on a thousand needles. A taped ankle on my take-off leg… it restricted me from getting my maximum lengths.”

Allergic to painkillers, doctors worried about the strain of all this on her body. “But Bobby was doing a great job in training and he designed my rehab programme. He took care of everything,” George says.

Now, that’s what they tell the girls at the academy. “We tell them they need to focus on training and we will take care of other things,” George says.

The Georges, parents to an eight-year-old and 11-year-old themselves, are also training community kids in Bengaluru, nurturing athletic talent in children aged 3 to 15.

The couple is expanding their academy too. By February, they hope to have their own training facility, funded again partly by SAI. It will be called the SAI Anju Bobby High Performance Jumps Academy, and will be able to house a total of 20 girls. There will be training in jumps, hurdles, the pentathlon and more. This facility will also be free, and aimed at girls from economically weak backgrounds.

It feels good to see the boom in sports in India, George says. “Today’s kids have a lot of opportunities we never had. In my time, even to gather information was a huge task. I am happy to see things are changing, and I am happy to be part of the change.”

Also part of that change is Singh. She is now being called the “next Anju Bobby George”, because when you talk of long jump in India, there is still only one benchmark.