Commonwealth Games 2018: Publicity shy P Gururaja basks in spotlight with long-overdue silver in weightlifting

Six months ago, the Australian city of Gold Coast was playing host to the Commonwealth Weightlifting Championship. P Gururaja was up against Chaturang Lakmal of Sri Lanka and Muhammad Azroy of Malaysia. The 25-year-old Indian would go on to finish behind both of them, and end with a bronze medal. However, he had done enough to earn a berth in the Indian squad for the Commonwealth Games, scheduled to be held in the same city six months later. That date was on Thursday. Gururaja was again battling for a medal, but this time the stakes were higher. He felt the pressure as he botched his first two attempts in the clean and jerk. It was a do-or-die moment in his final lift and he successfully managed to lift 138 kilograms to assure himself of a silver medal ahead of Lakmal. “The coach told me my life depended on it,” Gururaja said while interacting with the press following his medal winning performance. [caption id=“attachment_4419573” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Indian weightlifter P Gururaja at the Commonwealth Games weightlifting event on Thursday. PTI[/caption] After the dramatic medal winning lift, there were no celebratory fist pumps or joyous victory jumps for Gururaja, who quietly walked back with his coach and disappeared behind the curtains in the weightlifting hall. Gururaja has always enjoyed the anonymity. So while the spotlight has been on the likes of Mirabai Chanu and S Sathish among the weightlifters, it has allowed Gururaja to silently work his way up. Even in the domestic circuit, it’s weightlifters like Ganesh Mali and 2014 Glasgow gold medalist Sukhen Dey who have shone the brightest, while Gururaja has been more of a dark horse. Considered a late bloomer, he came into his own two years ago at the Commonwealth Championship in Penang, Malaysia, with a total lift of 249 kilograms. Last year’s bronze medal showing came after he lifted 246 kilograms. The two misses, he says, added pressure on him and prevented him from doing even better on Thursday. “I’m not sure why my second attempt was judged a foul. If I got my second lift correctly, I would have gone for gold,” he said, adding that he was also hampered by a sore back. “I wasn’t in my best form as my back was hurting,” he added.

Gururaja now has very little time to celebrate his success, as preparations for the Jakarta Asian Games kick off immediately after the lifters return to India. The competition at Jakarta will be tougher; at the previous Asiad, Wu Jingbiao of China clinched gold with a total lift of 288 kilograms, comfortable more than the 261 managed by Azroy at Gold Coast on Thursday.

Karnataka-based Gururaja says he entered sports after he was inspired by the feats of Sushil Kumar and once aspired to become a wrestler himself. He says he used to scour the villages and cities around him looking for wrestling coaches, but lack of infrastructure forced him to give up on the sport. His next passion was power lifting, which he picked up at the gym. And despite his wiry frame, he soon became a name to be reckoned with in the university circuit. A series of medals here, alongside coach Rajendra Prasad, convinced him to take the sport more seriously. Prasad was convinced that despite his wiry frame, Gururaja had a technique which was more suited to lifting. It was a decision that stumped Gururaja and it took him four years to get noticed. By 2014, he was winning medals at the national level and Gururaja had finally found his calling. The Commonwealth Games silver, he says, is the highlight of his career. “It was the first time my family watched me live on television,” he said, sheepishly admitting that it added to the burden of expectations. But it has also stirred him to strive for more glory at an even bigger stage and emulate the feat of his sporting idol Sushil Kumar at the Olympic stage. “For an Olympic medal, I have to work towards lifting around 300 kilograms,” said Gururaja, who is employed as an air craftsman with the Indian Air Force and feels the silver medal has given him wings to dream big. After doping controversies blighted the achievements of the Indian weightlifting teams, medals from the likes of Gururaja have helped the sport grab headlines for the right reasons and redeem itself. Hopefully, the upswing in the sport’s fortunes will continue and more medals from the lifters will swell India’s medal kitty in the coming days.