VELLORE: The palms of 41-year-old A Venkatesan are a rough sketch of his life — hard. For the past 20 years, he has been breaking stones for a meagre daily wage while his 36-year-old wife V Vijaya drudged as a housemaid. This wasn’t a life he wanted though. As a boy, he aspired to become a weightlifter and bring glory to the country. That dream, however, was crushed by an injury to his leg when he was 12 years old. Since then, not a single day passed without a part of his mind thinking about the life he never got to live. That’s until Rithika, his firstborn, came along.
As she took her baby steps, Venkatesan decided that what he couldn’t achieve his daughter would. And achieve she did. At the age of 18, the lass clinched a medal at the Junior World Championship organised by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) in Greece in May.Representing the tricolour in the 49-kg category, Rithika lifted 69 kg in ‘snatch’ and 81 kg in ‘clean-and-jerk’ to secure a bronze for the country. And as she stood beaming at the podium, back home at Mathi Nagar in Vellore’s Alamelumangapuram, Venkatesan and Vijaya swelled with pride.
The journey from a hesitant novice to a passionate professional wasn’t easy. Venketesan had enrolled Rithika at a coaching centre run by Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu (SDAT) in Sathuvachari when she was 10 years old. She was reluctant to undergo the coaching at first. “I was a little hesitant as the training was physically demanding and painful. Soon, however, it became my routine and I followed the regimen prescribed to me,” Rithika says.
The eldest among the couple’s three children, Rithika is a Class 11 student at Government Adi Dravidar Welfare Higher Secondary School near Alamelumangapuram in Vellore. Her two brothers, V Rajapandy (15) and V Harish (12), are Class 10 and 7 students at the same school. When their ancestral home became too dilapidated to live in, they moved to a rented house in Mathi Nagar in 2018 so the children could go to school more easily. The rent is a drain on our income, but we didn’t mind it as the family’s wellbeing comes first,” says Vijaya, adding that they had faced resistance from relatives for sending Rithika to weightlifting coaching classes as, according to them, “girls shouldn’t be in such sports.”
Rithika, however, would prove them wrong. In the years that followed, she took part in four junior nationals, winning medals in two and getting participation certificates in the other two. “I borrowed money to meet the expenses so that she could attend national-level competitions, held mostly in northern states,” says Venkatesan. The turning point in Rithika’s and her family’s lives was meeting R Kavitha, her coach at the SDAT training centre. Kavitha, a weightlifter herself, is a medallist in senior national-level competitions and a diploma holder in weightlifting. She was appointed a coach at SDAT in Vellore in 2016.
“When I observed Rithika, I knew she was going to win big. She has a physique befitting a weightlifter. She wasn’t very tall, which would help her lift heavier weights than a taller person of her age can. I coached her to improve her technique and gave her a regimen to follow, which she strictly did,” says Kavitha.
Under Kavitha’s guidance, Rithika went on to win a silver at the Youth National Championship in August 2020. The big break came in April 2022 when she was selected to represent India in the 49-kg category at Junior World Championship by IWF.
“Rithika’s technique and fitness fetched her a seat in the Indian camp,” Kavitha says.Rithika, however, is just starting out. She has her eyes set on the big three of international games. “I am looking forward to the Asian Games, the Commonwealth Games, and the Olympics. And will try my best to win medals and bring glory to my country.”