Almost Perfect — Stories Of Forgotten Indian Women Athletes

Vandana Rao, along with PT Usha, was part of the quartet of ​“Golden Girls” that set a new Asian record at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. However, just as her star began to rise, she encountered a different set of obstacles that led to her departure from athletics forever. This is her story.

In the 1990’s, Archana Venkataraman was a star on the rise. Since she was four, her tennis-obsessed family shuttled her from one tournament to another, one coaching clinic to the next. At seventeen, she was crowned the National Champion. Her place did not go unchallenged. At the finals of the National Games in 2002, Archana came up against a younger, hungrier, grittier rival — 16-year-old Sania Mirza. Playing the newcomer on her home turf in Hyderabad and booed by a hostile crowd of spectators, Archana went down in a firestorm of deuces. It takes a lot to succeed in a sport as expensive and competitive as tennis, more so for an Indian woman. In over a century, only four  have made it to a Grand Slam event. Viewed in that sobering light, Archana Venkataraman’s story is one worth telling. Listen to it on Almost Perfect.

Chekrovolu Swuro, the talented archer from Nagaland, represented India at the 2012 London Olympics. Followers of the sport may remember that she had competed in the same team as Deepika Kumari, the teenage sensation who rose to great heights. Despite culminating in defeat, Swuro’s story of resilience continues to enthuse aspiring archers. Listen to ​‘Missing The Mark’, the second episode of the Radio Azim Premji University series ​‘Almost Perfect’, which unearths the stories of Indian women athletes who competed alongside the best but fell short of success.