For Sharad Kumar, his tiny one-room apartment in Kharkiv, a six-hour train ride from Ukraine's capital city Kiev, is home. The 28-year-old para high jumper, who has been living in the Eastern European country for four years in slow-burn preparation for his final competitive appearance at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics this August, now finds himself faced with 17 more months of holding out in a foreign land.
The cost, both emotional and financial, is beginning to seep in.
"The idea was to train for four years here, compete at the Paralympics and then return to India and teach the next line of athletes whatever I'd learnt," Sharad tells ESPN. "It's not easy living alone in a foreign country where language is a barrier and life is largely restricted to training and cooking for myself and almost no social life, family or friends. I've run through all my savings in my time here."
Sharad, though, is grateful for the financial aid he has been receiving from the Target Olympic Podium Scheme and GoSports Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that supports Indian athletes, which covers his rent, coach's salary expenses and physio needs. It's only his everyday living expenses that he has to tend to. It has got him to pursue stock investing as a fairly new, often economically rewarding hobby. He has bought himself a stack of books on stock-market behaviour and analysis and, with training now at a halt, he devours them at a voracious pace. "I find it interesting...really interesting," says Sharad. "It's comforting, even if for that fleeting moment when the market bubbles and I fare well. More than anything else, this is the time athletes should take a break. It's what I'm trying to do. Just keeping my mind off training, competition, schedules, workouts and not tiring myself out early. When training resumes, I want to be fresh and hungry."
Born in Patna, Sharad contracted polio at the age of two, paralysing his left leg, after a local eradication drive administered spurious polio medicine. Competing in the T-42 category (athletes with limb deficiency, leg length difference, impaired muscle power or impaired passives range of movement without prosthesis), he made his debut at the 2010 Asian Para Games and touched the world No 1 spot when he was 19. His 1.80 clearance at the Asian Para Games later breached a 12-year-old record and he went on to finish sixth at the Rio Paralympics.
In Kharkiv, though, what Sharad misses most is human company. His search for friends has pushed him as much as to take up studies again. He's now pursuing a course in International Business Management from the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute. "Among the people I know, other than my coach [Nikitan Uffgan] no one speaks English. It's what got me to head to a university so I get to meet and interact with students from other countries. It's nice when you at least have a few people who you can speak to and maybe grab dinner together with at the end of a long day."
Uffgan was national high jump coach in India, where Sharad first met him. After his contract expired, Sharad followed him back to Ukraine. Living alone abroad may have knocked Sharad hard, but it has also taught him a few lessons to take home. From surviving on takeouts, he has learnt to cook and keep himself fed on a healthy, low-maintenance diet. "These four years have changed my whole idea of what sport means," he says. "I sleep early and wake up really early. I eat right and reward myself when I do the right things. I've learnt to value discipline. These weren't things I was doing earlier."
It has also brought him hope and the will to look ahead. "When the news [Olympics being deferred] first came in, I was crushed," he says. "I thought, 'This is it. It's over for me.' But I've come to realise that I can look at it differently. Yes, there could be a wave of younger competitors, who will be at an advantage, but I have the benefit of experience." Instead of calling time on his career at the end of the Games next year, Sharad is now considering giving himself another year of top-flight competition after the 2021 Games. "Since the Asian Para Games and the World Championships would both be just the year after the Paralympics, I'm thinking why not? If I'm going to train until Tokyo next year, why not make it a year more and stick it out for the other two biggies."
To Sharad's mind, the idea of 'home' has always been an amorphous one. He lived in boarding school dorms in Darjeeling when he was a young boy, spent his adolescent years in a Delhi school and thereafter stayed back in the national capital to complete his post-graduation in International Relations from JNU. His family comprises his parents, an older brother, a younger sister back in Patna and his girlfriend, whom he has been seeing for eight years. "Living away has made me more family-oriented," Sharad says. "It has drawn me closer to all of them. Earlier I really didn't feel for any of it. I wasn't bothered. Now, not only do I talk to them more often, I try to be involved in their lives and hear their problems out."
Over the past four years, Sharad has been home to Patna three times. His original plan was to return to India only after the Paralympics, but in the changed scenario of a world gripped by a pandemic and sport suspended, Sharad doesn't want to wait that long. "Once the lockdown back in India is lifted and air traffic is restored, I plan to visit my family," he says. "I never missed home all these years really because I always felt that all I had to do was a catch a flight and I'd be there any time I wanted. Now that I know it's not always that way, I long to be with them."