Bhavina one step from Paralympics TT gold
Success in singles at major international events had largely eluded the 34-year-old table tennis player from Gujarat; be it finishing seventh at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, 5th at the 2018 Asian Para Games or 11th at the 2018 World Championships.
As Bhavina Patel was preparing to leave for the airport to board her flight from Ahmedabad to Delhi en route to Tokyo, her longtime coach Lalan Doshi told her, “iss bar kuch alag hone wala hai (something different will happen this time).”
Success in singles at major international events had largely eluded the 34-year-old table tennis player from Gujarat; be it finishing seventh at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, 5th at the 2018 Asian Para Games or 11th at the 2018 World Championships. It was to be "different" at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics, where Patel has entered the final with a 3-2 (7-11, 11-7, 11-4, 9-11, 11-8) win over world No. 3 Miao Zhang, the Chinese against whom she had lost all her 11 previous encounters before Saturday.
Having already assured herself of a bronze and a first medal for India at these Paralympics on Friday, Patel will fight for gold in the women’s singles Class 4 category against another Chinese, the top-ranked Ying Zhou, who beat Patel in her opening match, on Sunday.
The world No. 12 Indian’s giant-killing run to the final that has taken down four higher-ranked players on the bounce might have come as a surprise to many, but not to Doshi.
“I knew the amount of work we have put in for this,” he said.
That work didn’t stop even during the pandemic-forced lockdown last year, when most elite athletes in India were forced to play the waiting game. For Patel, it picked up speed.
With a table at home in Ahmedabad and an old robot, Patel didn’t miss a single training session during the almost year-long phase, ramping it up to twice a day with Doshi, also an Ahmedabad resident, making daily visits to her place. “There were no distractions. The lockdown might have been a bad time for everybody else, but for us it was the best period. We used the time to improve her game considerably, which is on show in Tokyo,” he said.
The daily twin sessions stretched from 6am to 10am and from 4pm to 7pm, shuffling between high- and low-intensity training. Every aspect of Patel’s game was worked upon, and different patterns of play drawn out for different players. “We studied each of her possible opponents in Tokyo. We worked on her attack, defence, shot placement, control, reflexes, service, returns. We designed different patterns from where she could win a point,” Doshi said.
Earlier this year, the old robot made way for a brand new advanced one: the Butterfly Amicus Prime provided through the SAI-TOPS funding. “We had multi-ball sessions using that, which was very helpful,” Doshi said.
Patel would begin her days at 4am with sessions of yoga and meditation. “The entire set-up at home helped her during the lockdown,” her husband Nikul Patel said from Tokyo. “She would hit around 3,000 balls on an average daily. She didn’t stop for even one day.”
Patel said the uninterrupted hours and days put into her game over the last year-and-a-half ensured that she did not feel out of place even against the more established players across the table in Tokyo. “Everyone says that beating a Chinese in table tennis is impossible. But I’ve proven today (Saturday) that everything is possible, as long as you want it to happen,” she said.
“That’s just her mindset and self-belief,” Doshi said. “She has struggled so much, especially at the start of her career, that these traits are auto-processed in her system.”
It was Doshi who gave professional touch to the recreational paddler that Patel was during her early days at the Blind People’s Association (BPA) in Ahmedabad, where she moved to from Vadnagar to become independent while being confined to the wheelchair from when she was a year old. After winning her first national tournament in 2007, Patel had to progress to the international level, which meant pumping in more money to participate and travel for tournaments.
Her father Hasmukhbhai, who owns a small cutlery shop in the village, didn’t have the means for it. “They took personal loans so that she could travel for tournaments in Asia and Europe,” Nikul said. “The initial days were difficult for her. But if you have a strong will to do something, a road will always open up. And Bhavina had that will.”
A lot of the foundation work on that road was done by the BPA, one of the largest NGOs for the disabled in India with 16 campuses spread across Gujarat. Apart from chipping in financially for her training and international trips, BPA enrolled her in a computer course in their Industrial Training Institute. In 2017, Patel secured a government job at ESIC (Employees' State Insurance Corporation) in Ahmedabad.
“She came from a village where even going to school was a big challenge because she was on a wheelchair. But somehow she managed to complete it before moving to Ahmedabad,” said Bhushan Punani, general secretary of BPA Ahmedabad. “But even in her days of struggle, she kept going. She would go abroad to compete on very small budgets. But she didn’t let it affect her; she won over that with her determination.”
Out of the three table tennis tables in its premises, the association has kept one reserved for use by Bhavina and Sonal Patel, another paddler from BPA who made the Tokyo cut. “That international standard table can be touched by nobody else apart from these two players and one sparring partner,” Punani said. “It’s been a long journey of over a decade with Bhavina. But we never imagined that she will be in the final of the Paralympics one day.”