CHENNAI: Fifteen minutes into 2017, Shah Rukh Khan took to Twitter to promote the first look poster of ‘Mariyappan’, a movie based on the life of Thangavelu Mariyappan, who had won a Paralympics gold in Rio de Janeiro. The movie’s tagline hit home the athlete’s belief and spirit. “The world may think you can’t,” it said. “What you think is what matters”.
This mantra has fuelled Mariyappan and his mother, Saroja, for pretty much their entire adult life including when he lay on a pool of his own blood at a government hospital near Salem when he was five. He had suffered an accident and the doctors had informed Saroja that they would have to remove his leg.
Saroja, guided by blind belief, won that argument. That belief, it’s fair to say, was vindicated when Mariyappan won the T42 high jump event in Brazil. In Tokyo, Mariyappan kept up the pre Paralympics predictions by medalling — a silver — in the T63 discipline.
What makes this silver that bit more special is the circumstances the TN athlete, who hails from a village near Salem, found himself in a day before the start of the Paralympics. As he was deemed to be in touch with a close contact of somebody who had tested positive for Covid-19, he was asked to isolate. That meant he also couldn’t be the flagbearer for the Opening Ceremony. Even though he was crushed (he wanted that honour), he motivated himself by keeping up his training and fitness routine in his hotel room. There was, he knew, no time to sulk when there was an event to be won.
He could have actually won gold in the event. With the bar at 1.88m, USA’s Sam Grewe needed to nail his third and final attempt. Otherwise, Mariyappan was walking away with gold on the countback rule. Grewe, who holds the world record with a jump of 1.90m in this event in 2019, just about cleared the height. The disappointment, when the camera panned to Mariyappan’s face, was writ large. The conditions — rain and a slippery track — did not make it any easier. As he doesn’t have prosthetics on his right leg, his sock got wet which eventually affected his take off. It’s a point he made in the post-event press conference.
He also promised to go for gold in Paris in 2024. When you take into consideration his time since 2016 has been a rocky ride, he’s done well to refocus. In 2017, he was questioned following the death of a 19-year-old in Salem. He was questioned and cleared. Following that, he had a troublesome ankle injury before getting back into form with a bronze at the Worlds in 2019.
Incidentally, at the Worlds in 2019, compatriot Sharad Kumar finished above him on the podium. This year, Kumar finished in third place making it the second time in two successive editions where Indians have won two medals in this event (in 2016, Varun Bhati won bronze).
There is no fresh confirmed news of Mariyappan’s biopic. It was expected that the movie would hit theatres in 2020 before the pandemic put paid to it. One of the film websites now lists the movie for a release in ‘September 2023’. What would remain constant is the film’s tagline. Mariyappan is living proof of it.