BENGALURU: There are many labels that can be given to Olympian athlete Dutee Chand, like ‘the fastest woman in India’, or ‘the first openly queer Indian athlete’. But there’s one label she prefers to go by. “I’m human. My duty is to train and win medals for the country, and I will do that till the day I die,” she said at the We The Women event held in Bengaluru on Sunday.
Recalling her journey thus far, the 23-year-old athlete recounted how her tryst with 100m events happened by chance. “Initially, I was a marathoner who ran 20km races. I had no intention to do the 100m events. But when my coach retired, the next one told me that he was only a sprint coach,” she said, while talking about the switch she made. In 2012, she took part in the Youth National Championship in Bengaluru – her first 100m event – where she didn’t just win a gold medal but also broke the national record. Chand has two-and-half times her body weight (which is 50kg) in medals, and has even gone on to break her own record many times. She revealed that her latest record, made at Ranchi recently, now stands at 11.22s.
Her time on the track, however, has been full of hurdles, right from naysayers making comments about her being a female runner to the 2014 ban she faced due to alleged hyperandrogenism. “I was informed at the last moment that I couldn’t take part in championships. They didn’t tell me the reason or that they conducted a gender test. I found out through newspaper headlines the next day,” she said. Chand went on to appeal against the decision, and fought for her right to run, an effort that took two years and `2 crore.
She faced challenges at home too. Upon finding out about her same-sex relationship, Chand said, her sister Saraswati – who has also been her inspiration and the one who motivated her to take up sports – started torturing her. “I went public with my sexual orientation because she threatened to announce it to people. The torture started affecting my training; I thought if the media found out, people would give me dirty looks,” she said, adding that the decriminalisation of Section 377 is what gave her the courage to let people know about herself.
Chand said she has already achieved her childhood dream, but has many more to look forward to in future. “I want to be a coach, and start a sprint academy to nurture the country’s sports talents,” she said. “I also want to join politics and serve my country.”