Wow, I'm Going To Be An Olympian, Exclaims a Jubilant Dutee Chand
An excited Dutee Chand, who became the first Indian to qualify for the 100m event at an Olympic Games after 36 years, says sprint events need more attention back home.
- Suprita Das
- Updated: June 25, 2016 11:17 PM IST
Highlights
- Dutee became first Indian athlete to qualify for 100m after 36 years
- PT Usha had qualified for 100m in 1980 Moscow Olympics
- She is a national record holder in women's 100 metres
They're desperate to get an action photograph of hers for their newspapers and websites. "I don't have anything. Sorry, nothing on my phone to share with you," Dutee Chand has to disappoint the local press in Almaty, Kazakhstan,where she made history earlier in the day.
The Odisha girl clocked11.30 seconds in the 100m heats at the G Kosanov Memorial meet, to book her ticket for August's Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The Olympic qualification mark was 11.32 seconds. The press in Almaty, and elsewhere, realise what makes Dutee's qualification so significant.
"This is the best moment of my life," Dutee told NDTV from Almaty. "I am happy. Happier than when I won my case at CAS." Before the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, Dutee was dropped from the national squad, when test results showed she had abnormal levels of testosterone.
 She was suffering from something called hyperandrogenism, which produced high levels of testosterone in her body. No way, mind you, was Dutee a man. Her test results were made public in the most insensitive manner possible, and she was labelled as a man who was running in women's events at competitions.
"I went back to my home in Odisha and went to the Jagannath temple," recalls Dutee. "I asked god, what have I done wrong? All I want to do is run." Dutee lost an entire year of training and competition, and spent most of her time home with her weaver parents in Odisha.
But she wasn't one to give up. With help from then Director General of Sports Authority of India (SAI), Jiji Thomson, Dutee fought her case at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). And in a landmark judgement last year, CAS upheld her appeal partially and allowed her to resume her career.
At the Fedeation Cup in April in New Delhi this year, also an Olympic qualification event, Dutee won gold, clocking 11.33 seconds, missing out by a whisker. "If I didn't qualify today that fraction of a second would have bothered me for the next four years," she says. "It encouraged me more, and gave me hope that 11.32 was definitely possible for me to run."
"I am excite now to even think that I am going to be an Olympian," she says, thanking national badminton coach Pullela Gopichand, at whose academy in Hyderabad, she was training all these months with her coach N Ramesh. "I may complete the rest of my training in Hyderabad, or in the US if I can as the weather is better there."
But 100 and 200m events are neglected in India. "All the attention is on the 400m runners and relay," Dutee says. "If I had better competition at home, and our standards were better, my qualification would have come much earlier. The girl from Kazakhstan who won the final ran 11.16s, while I ran 11.24s. That's how much the difference is."
Despite making history by becoming the first Indian to qualify for the 100m event at the Olympics for the first time since PT Usha in 1980, Dutee hasn't been able to share her joy with her family just yet. Just a couple of messages have been exchanged with her sister Saraswati back home. But she hopes to meet them soon when she returns after the competition in Almaty.