With several big-ticket sporting events lined up in 2022, including the Asian and Commonwealth Games, we look at athletes for whom this could be a big year. We profiled wrestler Vinesh Phogat, footballer Manisha Kalyan, shooter Manu Bhaker, tennis player Yuki Bhambri earlier. Next up, fencer Bhavani Devi, who created history for India at Tokyo Olympic and has to build on that in an action-packed year.
Coach Christian Bauer was faced with an unusual request from his only Indian student a few weeks ago. Bhavani Devi pleaded with him to not give her a break from training. It was right after the World Cup in Tbilisi in January where she lost early, in the round of 64. On their return to Orleans, Bauer treated his trainees to a few days off. But it was the last thing Bhavani wanted. "I just didn't want to be alone at home with plenty of time to feel bad about how the tournament went. Every morning I'd wake up and pester coach Bauer to allow me to train," she says. "For a week, I felt miserable about my performance. I kept it bottled in and told no one, only the coach knew. It's been hard. I'm still settling into all the changes in my life, particularly in training."
The last few months have been a completely new world for Bhavani - new home, city, country, coach, training methods, sparring partners. It's only been a few months since she uprooted her life in Livorno, Italy on the advice of her former coach Nicola Zanotti, and moved to France to train under renowned Bauer, 70, at his academy. In a year stacked with major tournaments - World Championships, Asian Championships and Asian Games, apart from a smattering of World Cups, adaptability is key and time is at a premium.
The 28 year-old steps into a battery of major events in 2022 aware that she will be expected to go beyond resting on the novelty of her unique position in the Indian fencing landscape. She's already broken through sufficient firsts and shone the spotlight on herself and the sport, even if momentarily. In the coming months she'd be judged on how far beyond the firsts she goes.
Bhavani was the first Indian to medal at an Asian Championships (U-23 in 2015) and make the pre-quarterfinals of a World Championships (2019). In 2021, she became the first Indian to parry on an Olympic piste - a gargantuan moment for fencing in the country. It was also the first time many of her acquaintances watched her compete live. In Tokyo, won one match, exited in the Round of 32, and a month later shifted to France. In her first event after Tokyo, she won the women's sabre individual at the Charleville nationals, a domestic French competition, in October. The next Olympics is now two years away and she plans to train under Bauer until then. The Asian Games, a sore recall from four years ago, is in six months' time.
Bhavani has never been to an Asian Games before, for reasons beyond her control. She was bafflingly left out of the squad for the 2018 Games by the national federation at the last minute. The rationale offered then was that she'd failed to make the top-8 of that year's Asian Championships. It overlooked the fact that she'd lost by a wafer-thin 14-15 margin to South Korean great Hwang Seon. The decision sent her hurtling into a mental abyss and nearly put her funding on the line. The following year she won gold at the Commonwealth Championships. "It took me a while to recover from the disappointment of being left out," she says, "Now I've been in enough competitions to know that I can win medals. I just need to organise my thoughts better in competitions, so they occur to me quicker in tense moments. I'm working really hard. Then I see coach Bauer, who is 70, comes in at eight in the morning for a 9am session and leaves after most of us. He's a legend, and I'm lucky he agreed to train me."
At this point, she already finds herself outside her comfort zone in training, trying to catch her breath. On most days, training at the Bauer academy can be divided into two sessions and run up to eight hours. It's taxing, unfamiliar, and Bhavani is still trying to gain a toehold. If she is propped on balance beams and parallel bars for footwork and agility workouts on some days, it is Zumba dance routines on others. Bhavani is willing to throw herself into the deep end of it all. A small price, she says, to train under a legend.
Seventy-year old sabre coach Bauer has had great success in Olympic-medal churning - Italian great Aldo Montana's 2004 Athens gold, men's individual gold and women's team silver as the Chinese national team's coach and the Russians' multiple medals in London and Rio. "I've always loved the training part of my sport, no matter how difficult. It keeps me going even on my worst days. In France, the fencing style is quite different - right from the guard position, the way we hold the sabre, movements, parries. It's a lot more elegant, technical, needs quicker reflexes and is tougher to execute. I need to pick them up quickly. I don't have much time," she says.
While the training methods may be new and unsettling for Bhavani, the quality of sparring at Bauer's academy is at a much superior level than she's known. In Italy, the academy roster largely comprised of juniors and boys. In Orleans, she goes up every day against some of the top women fencers from across the world, including two-time Olympic medalist, current world No 2, and the one who ended her Tokyo Olympics run - Manon Brunet. "At my former club, most of the other fencers were Italians, so at times you can feel like an outsider. The Orleans center has great fencers and also a good mix of nationalities, some from Greece, Nigeria, Georgia, so training is competitive every day. We stick close, travel for the same competitions so even in an individual sport it feels like a team, working together."
The level of sparring is also helping her see the ground she needs to cover in matches. Namely, the need to be patient and make the right decisions. "Sometimes I make repeated mistakes," she says, in part admonishment, "Everyone makes mistakes, but the best names make fewer of them. That's what I need to learn."
Bhavani is still setting up her home in Orleans and only moved out of her Airbnb studio to a rented flat last week. She compares the city, situated on the Loire River roughly 100 kilometers south-west of Paris, with Livorno by the harshness of their winters. "Here," she says, "it gets a lot colder than in Italy but otherwise the vibe of a small, quiet town is quite similar." Now that she's bought herself a rice cooker off Amazon, she's traded her pasta carbonara staple for self-cooked Indian meals.
Her next competition in a choked calendar - a World Cup in Athens from March 4-6, is only three weeks away and she knows she has to hunker down and train. It's the part Bhavani follows with obsessive diligence without being too fussed about its payoff. In a big 2022 season, it's the diligence that will count.