CHENNAI: Pep talks are not really my thing,” admitted kettlebell champion Vignesh Hariharan, while addressing a group of students who had enrolled for the TNSDC Personal Trainer Course at Unschool in Anna Nagar, where he was invited as a guest speaker to do just that. “What I can do is narrate some of the obstacles I encountered on my journey so far and see what motivation you can derive from it,” he reassured his audience.
For Vignesh, whose grandfather was a silambattam practitioner and father, a sportsperson, it seemed only natural that he should take to sport with about as much ease as a fish taking to water. “I eventually did, but I got here through a longwinded route,” said Vignesh, who in 2019 won the Melbourne Kettlebell World Championship, the first from south India.
The aspiring cricketer
Incidentally, Vignesh’s first foray into sport was as a cricketer. “From the age of five, I was paraded through all the major cricket clubs and grounds in Chennai, and my father was determined he would make me a cricketer,” he said. But he simply failed to find success as a batter, and a ligament tear ruled out his chances of making it into the Under-14 team. With a cricket career out of the question, the boy now shifted his attention to Class 10 exams. “It was a surprise to everyone, including me, when I scored 90 per cent in the public exams,” he shared.
Vignesh repeated the feat in his Class 12 exams and enrolled at an engineering college in the city. At this point, the injury had healed, and he was good to resume cricket aspirations, but there was a catch. “Five years of physical inactivity had caused me to gain a lot of weight, and to backtrack and get back into shape plus make it into the national team, the possibilities were dim. So I resigned myself to the life of an engineering graduate,” he said. But the college-goer was determined to win back his fitness at any rate, “So one morning in 2005 I walked into a gym and started working out. We’re now in 2022, and I’ve never broken my routine.”
From IT to sporting gold
Soon, a plump job at an IT firm followed, but a lack of fulfilment gnawed Vignesh. After eight years as an IT professional, he gathered whatever savings he had and with a sizeable loan, went into business by opening Hammer Gym, his own fitness studio in Kolathur. “It was primarily a gut feeling; there was this little whisper in my ear that said I wasn’t here to do this,” Vignesh recalled.
At this period, he was also introduced to kettlebell lifting the relatively unheard-of sport in India, and that would eventually be his calling card to glory at the 2019 World Championship in Melbourne. “That decision is precisely why I’m here before all of you today, narrating my journey.” So what lesson should one draw from Vignesh’s success? “Find your niche. Figure out that specific skill you are unique in, and success will someday follow you,” is what he had to say.