Feet blurring past spectators as she races towards the finish line, Sneha Sathyanarayana Shanuvalli Gowda has been leaving her competitors in the dust since she was a primary school student. “We had to run in 100m and 200m events, and when running with the boys, the teachers would say to each other ‘Sneha is so fast!’ I would run even faster to impress them,” laughs Gowda. Decades since then, she is still keeping pace with the boys but on the international stage, having recently won a bronze medal in the 4x100 mixed relay race at the Asian Games. “It was an important race for us, so when we crossed the finish line and the screen read that we had set a new national record (41.06 seconds), we were very happy; it is impossible to describe it now. I think I slept for just one hour the whole night,” she adds.
The family who supported the athlete from Chikkamagaluru through the years is ‘still in disbelief,’ says Gowda, continuing with a tinge of sadness in her smile, “Sadly, my uncle, who, with my dad, used to brag to the whole town whenever I won a medal at school, is no more and not here to see this. Nobody has given me as much publicity as him.”
Being a reserve athlete for the relay, Gowda running in the final was a surprise decision, she shares, “I was the first reserve athlete. Abhinaya Rajarajan and Harita Bhadra competed in the heats, but because Abhinaya has been suffering from strain in her hamstring, the team did not want to take a risk. They also wanted someone with experience for the finals,” she says somberly.
When it was time to run, it came down to trusting the work the four athletes had already put in, as she says, “We had practised with the boys during our training camps abroad, but it had been some time since then. We told ourselves we should not panic and just trust each other and the training we had done. If we executed the race correctly, everything else would fall into place.” Most of the year, the athlete had been training at the Olympic camp in Thiruvananthapuram. But it was the camps held in Europe in the months leading up to the Asian Games that completely changed how she thought about competing. “Two months ago, we were in Poland and then in the Czech Republic for 15 days. There is always fear in competing in a new country. Training with other countries’ athletes prepares you mentally, so we had already overcome it before the Asian Games,” the 28-year-old sprinter says. It was a lesson in sportsmanship too. “I thought I would reveal too much about myself or that they would learn my technique. But training there made me realise that it’s better to be friendly and have the same attitude on and off the track. Through watching and speaking to them, we pick up their techniques. If they learn something from us in the process, it’s a good thing!” she opines.
Apart from her own medal achievement, the moment most meaningful to the athlete from her time in Japan was when the Indian athletics team got its first gold medal in the 4x400 women’s relay. “Our ceremony and theirs was on the same day. After ours, we were not allowed to stay. But everyone was so excited to hear the national anthem play that we snuck behind the photographers and stood there in the rain through their ceremony. It was a moment and reminded me of winning gold in China with the women’s relay team earlier this year [at the Asian Relays Championships]”