Sports
Yuvraj Singh:
The man who fought
-Devansh Mishra
A day that is etched in cricket and non-cricket fans alike. An unforgettable moment. A divine moment. “Dhoni finishes it off in style. A magnificent strike into the crowd. India lift the world cup after 28 years”. These words… the defining moment in all of Indian cricketing history, you could say. It was almost a dream come true for everyone in the crowd, in the dressing room, and even the ones intently staring at their television sets back home like me. But most people saw the “magnificent strike into the crowd”, rejoiced when their team won, and two minutes later switched off their television sets and exited the stadium. But nobody stuck around for the post-match presentation. The one where Ravi Shastri took centre stage, announced the name of the Man of the Tournament, and Yuvraj Singh hobbled up to the podium, waving his hand to a half-empty crowd.
Yuvraj Singh, a soft-spoken person, a silent assassin you could say. Yuvi was born to a Punjabi family in Chandigarh, his parents were Yograj Singh and Shabnam Singh. Interestingly, his dad was also a former Indian cricketer who played for the national team, which is what may have led the man himself to pursue cricket. Yuvi loved both tennis and roller skating at a young age, and he even won the National Under-14 Roller Skating Championship. But, his father threw away the medal and forced him to pursue cricket, and Yuvi obliged. We all know how that turned out!
Starting off by playing the regional league matches and the Ranji trophy for Chandigarh, his first national call-up came for the 2000 U-19 World Cup, under Mohammed Kaif’s captaincy. In the tournament, he showed remarkable class and all-round performance, earning him the Player of the Tournament. This was when people started sitting up and taking notice of him. Heads started to turn towards this quiet destroyer. He earned a place in the national senior team, and boy, did he announce himself at the biggest stage in all of cricket.
He scored hundreds of runs in the senior team, and soon, he solidified his position on number 4 and 5 on the back of several consistent performances. There were many highs and lows and lowers too, but that didn’t stop him from coming back harder and stronger than ever before.
In the 2007 World Cup, there was an iconic Yuvraj Singh moment that people cherish even today. Stuart Broad starts the 18th over at the death, runs in quick,
and Yuvi smashes him over deep square for a six. It didn’t feel like much other than one six, except it wasn’t just one. Next came number 2, 3, 4… People holding their breaths in the crowd. It was turning out to be something really special… 5. The dressing room comes
Yuvi struggling during the match against West Indies.
onto their feet, hands up near their mouths, praying… Almost an eternity went by
Yuvraj Singh, the man who battled against all odds, and came out victorious
before Broad could come up for the last ball of the over, and number 6! “6 sixes in an over!” Celebration erupts, and Yuvi calmly walks up to his partner for a fist-bump. In the same match, he attained a world record of the fastest fifty in just 12 deliveries.
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Fast-forward to the 2011 World Cup. India looked like a formidable opposition at the beginning of the tournament, having a star-studded line-up including Tendulkar, Dhoni and Sehwag. Yuvi, being one of the senior members of the team now, had a lot of responsibility on his shoulders to perform, and perform he did. In the league stages, India had only a solitary loss to South Africa out of its six matches, finishing second in its group, which owed in a large part to Yuvi’s performances.
The match against West Indies is what showed the world who Yuvraj Singh actually was. Batting first, India lost Sachin and Gambhir early, and Yuvi came in at 51/2, to join Kohli on the crease. He steadied the ship of the Indian team and stitched a remarkable partnership along with Kohli of 120 runs. During the game, he felt an uneasiness in his body, and later he even started to vomit on the field. Some of it contained blood. But he fought on. And amazingly so. Yuvi was instrumental in getting the team up to the mammoth score of 268, with him scoring a 123-ball 113. The century he scored was one of the greatest innings of cricketing history. Even while coughing up blood, he still stayed on the field like a pillar for his team. After the tournament, he was devised with a rare type of germ-cell cancer. He had to undergo treatment for the disease for a long period in the United States, but eventually, the doctors were successful in curing his cancerous cells.
Yuvi eventually went on to win the Man of the Tournament trophy in the 2011 World Cup, scoring 362 runs and picking up 15 wickets too, along with 4 Man of the Match trophies during the tournament. He was the one who paved the way for India becoming the dominating power in world cricket.
Yuvraj raises his bat to the crowd to commemorate his century against WI.
Currently, Yuvi is an ambassador of his own organisation for cancer research called ‘YouWeCan’. Till now, YouWeCan has been able to screen 1.5 lakh people, for cancer, given many scholarships to many
cancer-affected kids, and spread awareness to reduce tobacco consumption in India. After his retirement in 2017, Yuvraj has become the ambassador of how to lead your life to the fullest. His greatest achievement isn’t just his fight against cancer, it’s how he fought.
Jesse's race
-Avni Bansal
Jesse Owens is hailed as the greatest track-and-field athlete of the twentieth century. He catapulted himself to fame in America when he shattered 3 world records and tied a fourth at the 1935 Big Ten Track Meet. The following year, he surpassed himself by becoming the first American track-and-field athlete to win four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. And he did all this as a poor African American living in segregated America and competing in Nazi Germany. In my opinion, Jesse Owens’s life is especially poignant today, because it serves as a kind of measuring stick for how much society has evolved since the 1930s. On the one hand, we should be proud that nobody has to face the indignities of the Jim Crow laws or be legally denied opportunities because of their skin colour like Owens was. But on the other hand, some of the challenges Owens faced are eerily similar to the ones still faced by minorities today and should serve as a timely reminder that our world is still far from perfect.
The racist zeitgeist of America in the early 1900s meant that Jesse Owens lived a tough life. Despite his athletic prowess, his alma mater Ohio State University denied him a scholarship because he was African American. In the land that is supposed to reward talent and hard work, the fastest man in America was forced to work part-time jobs delivering groceries and working in shoe repair shops to pay for college. We may think that such a tragic abuse of talent would never take place today, but we’d be mistaken. It’s a shame that a majority of student-athletes still have to work odd jobs and rack up large student loans to pay for college and pursue their dreams.
Owens(right) on his way to clinching the 200m gold at the Berlin Olympics. Source: Olympics.org
Even as Jesse Owens won medals and earned popularity, his track-team made him stay separately from them at ‘black-only’ hotels and eat alone at ‘black-only’ restaurants. On the eve of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the NAACP urged Owens to boycott the Olympics on the laughable grounds that "If there are minorities in Germany who are being discriminated against, the United States should withdraw from the
Jesse Owens, the black man who humiliated Hitler
Source: Biography
1936 Olympics". Owens thought it was absurd that the United States wanted to protest ‘minorities’ being ‘discriminated against’ given how unabashedly racist his fellow American teammates seemed to be. Echoes of that hypocrite American stance persist in modern American policy. It’s ironic that even as America continues to advocate human rights in the UN and condemn the suppression of minorities in communist regimes, they blasely ignore domestic institutional racism.
Jesse Owens decided to transcend all the racism and hatred and sailed to Berlin to do what he did best: run. There, he dazzled the world by winning four gold medals. His victories were praised as having “single-handedly crush[ed] Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy". There are conflicting accounts as to whether Hitler congratulated Owens or not, but it is unambiguous that the American president did not. Jesse Owens told reporters that “Some people say Hitler snubbed me. But I tell you, Hitler did not snub me. I am not knocking the President. Remember, I am not a politician, but remember that the President did not send me a message of congratulations because, people said, he was too busy.”
Despite his international fame and world-class athleticism, when Jesse Owen returned to America, he had a tough time finding work. He was reduced to working at a gas station, as a janitor, and as a dry cleaner. He even raced against horses for money. Owens said that ‘there was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.’
Things have changed. The fact that 6 of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world today are of African American descent is a testament to how much more tolerant and just the world has become. It took a lot for things to get this way. Such great equality in sport is the legacy of minority athletes like Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis, Jackie Robinson and Muhammed Ali, who showed the world that anyone from any background can achieve anything.