The bare house, with no furniture and a lot of natural light, is clean. A thin mattress is rolled up in a corner. I sit on a mat on the floor. Santhi Soundarajan walks in and says “good morning”. Her talk is spirited and jovial. Her wide, bright smile conceals the loss and pain of a decade. It vanishes only when she starts talking about her ordeal.
Middle-distance runner Soundarajan’s quick rise and fall had rocked the world of athletics ten years ago. She is back from the morning’s training session with her 35 students—20 girls and 15 boys. Most of them are from impoverished backgrounds, like her. Till recently, she lived in a tiny, dingy house. Sulthan Ali, a local businessman whose daughter is one of Soundarajan’s trainees, offered her accommodation in one of the twenty small houses that he owns in Mayiladuthurai’s Krishnan Koil Bhai Colony.
Soundarajan was born in Kathakuruchi village in Pudukkottai district of Tamil Nadu to Dalit parents who were engaged in daily labour at a brick kiln. Her grandfather initiated her into running when she was small. The young girl ran barefoot on dusty mud roads in the village whenever she found time away from taking care of her four siblings while her parents worked.
She started winning prizes at school sports events. “Nothing great. Tumblers, glasses and things like that,” she says, laughing. But, back then, these meant a lot to her and her family. It encouraged her to work harder.
She won 11 international medals for India, including the 800m silver at the Asian Athletics Championships in South Korea in 2005 and the 1500m gold at the South Asian Games in Colombo in August 2006. She was declared the best athlete at the National Open Championship in New Delhi in September 2006.
The December 2006 Asian Games in Doha was the big chance that she had been waiting for.
In Doha, 25-year-old Soundarajan ran the 800m as if her life depended on it. She fell flat on the track and looked up at the sky and then at the cameras, as if in disbelief. She won a silver medal.
She lost the medal within two days. With it, she lost all her dignity. She had failed a gender test; she got to know from news on TV.
The day after her victory, she had been subjected to a gender test. She says Dr Arun Kumar Mendiratta (chairman of Athletics Federation of India medical commission) brought her in for the tests but did not tell her what they were for. The reports sent to the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) said Soundarajan “does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman”, The Times of India reported in 2006.
She was told over the phone that she had to stop competing by Lalit Bhanot, then secretary of AFI, who would later get elected as general secretary of the IOA despite spending a year in jail on charges of corruption in organising the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games. She says the officials made her sign some papers in English, a language she has trouble reading and does not speak fluently. She was stripped of her Asian Games silver medal and didn’t get the prize money.
Probing looks and nasty comments about her gender identity made her vulnerable. She fell into depression and attempted to kill herself in 2007.
In 2009, when there were discussions about South African athlete Caster Semenya retaining her Berlin medal, BBC Sport reported Bhanot saying, “If they give the medal to Semenya, we can think of fighting (Santhi’s case) with the international authorities. Why should not Soundararajan get her medal back?”
But no efforts were made even after Semenya was allowed to retain her medal, and made a comeback to athletics competitions in 2010. Bhanot was IOA’s secretary general between 2012 and 2014.
“No one helped me. No one,” says Soundarajan.
She started working at the brick kiln where her parents worked as daily wage labourers.
She invested some of the Rs 15 lakh the state government had given her as a prize to start a running academy, but had to shut it soon after the money ran out. Her job as an athletics coach with the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu (SADT) did not last long either, as the temporary nature of the job and the meagre salary of Rs 5,000 a month did not provide her any financial security.
She went back to her village and set up a brick kiln of her own and worked 18 hours a day. After years of struggle, and with the help of gender rights activists, she was accepted into Sports Authority of India’s Diploma in Sports Coaching programme in 2013. She completed the course in April 2014.
With the diploma she managed to get a job as an athletics coach but only on contractual basis, at SAI’s Mayiladuthurai centre not far from where she was born. She is hoping that SAI will renew her one-year contract which ends in July, as they did last year. So far she hasn’t heard from them. Her elderly parents and four siblings are dependent on her income.
Soundarajan says that she has not seen the result of the gender test that she is said to have failed. In May, in response to an RTI query filed by her, the AFI has said that it had barred her from competing.
“The AFI’s RTI response says that they did not bar me while other authorities—Indian Olympic Association, SAI, ministry of youth services and sports—have all responded to my separate RTI queries saying that the matter did not pertain to them. Now I am not sure who banned me in the first place,” she says.
She has demanded that her gender test report is shared with her. The AFI has said the reports can be given only to Soundarajan in person. She needs to visit the AFI office in Delhi and prove her identity.
She is eager to see her reports but does not have the money to travel. Her last salary went into her sister’s pregnancy-related expenses, apart from her regular expenditure on training students. Only four of them are in the state-sponsored SAI training programme. The rest of them depend on whatever donations she can manage.
The MLA from Mayiladuthurai, V Radhakrishnan of AIADMK, promised Santhi that the state government would offer her Rs 1.5 crore to start a sports academy in Mayiladuthurai. Their talks are at a preliminary stage.
She has an ambitious plan to start a world class sports academy, with an initial cost of Rs 25 crore.
Soundarajan has cropped her once-long hair, and switched from wearing saree, bindi and jasmine to shirt and trousers, after people hounded her by calling her a man. The makeover was also intended as a disguise.
However, with some of her students doing well at state-level competitions, people in the small town of Mayiladuthurai have started recognising her, this time as a hard working and inspiring coach. Sulthan Ali’s motorcycle proudly sports a sticker of her Doha race with words “The one & only athlete”.
She says that her “children”, as she refers to her trainees, will bring her medals that she was not given a chance to win. “Three of my girls are sure shot Olympians. Not just Olympians, Olympic medalists. They are still very young and are working very hard. Just wait for a few years and you will see them winning medals,” she says.
All she wants is to get her Asiad silver medal back. Her hopes of returning to the track, which were revived with Semenya’s return and Dutee Chand’s victory at CAS—which suspended the hyperandrogenism regulations for two years—are lost forever.
“I can wear a saree everyday and grow my hair long. I am ready to do that. Are they ready to give my medal back?” Soundarajan asks. “The track is my only partner.”