‘Toxic’ childhood to cycle manufacturing unit to Indian hockey crew for Tokyo Olympics

AROUND 13 years in the past, Savitri Devi enrolled the youngest of her three daughters at a hockey academy in Haryana’s Sonepat in order that she might escape the “toxic” ambiance at house.
“My husband would get drunk, and become abusive and violent. Whenever he came home, my daughter used to shut her eyes, close both her ears with her fingers and hide behind me. That was no way to live. The hockey ground felt safer,” says Devi, who labored as a home assist and at a cycle manufacturing unit to feed her household.
Today, that daughter is about to make her maiden look for India on the world’s largest sporting stage — the Olympic Games. Neha Goyal, 24, is a part of the 16-member Indian ladies’s hockey crew that was introduced Thursday for the Tokyo Games subsequent month.
From working alongside her mom and sisters on the cycle manufacturing unit straightening spokes for about Rs 2,000 a month to Team India, it has been an unimaginable journey for the promising midfielder.
“Her coach says this is a big deal,” says Devi, now 55. “And I trust her.”
She is speaking about Pritam Siwach, an Arjuna Awardee and a member of India’s 2002 CWG gold medal-winning ladies’s crew. Siwach, 46, runs a hockey academy in Sonepat — a modest facility, a mid-sized floor with an uneven enjoying floor.
“Neha was 11 when I spotted her loitering near the ground every day. She didn’t speak a lot. So one day, I gave her a skipping rope. She showed a lot of stamina so I thought, ‘why not try to teach her hockey?’” she recollects.
Siwach promised Neha “two proper meals” if she would play. “I wanted to convince her parents so I went to her home, which wasn’t too far from the academy,” Siwach says.
But, she provides, Neha was “embarrassed” to ask her. “It was basically just one very small, dimly lit room. If you took 10 small steps, you’d hit a wall,” Siwach says. There was a small TV on a wood plank on one nook, a makeshift kitchen on the opposite facet, and a cot.
The household of 5 lived subsequent to an open drain. In an earlier interview, Neha had recalled her struggles: “All I remember is my father coming home drunk and things getting out of control. He didn’t have a job.”
And but, her teammates confide, she has all the time been “among the happy-go-lucky players in the team, always smiling no matter what the situation”.
But her mom “worked from morning till evenings to make sure our basic needs were taken care of”. Soon, the ladies within the household began working collectively on the cycle manufacturing unit. “For one spoke, we were paid Rs 5,” says Devi.
Neha, whose father handed away a couple of years in the past, continued serving to her mom even after she began enjoying hockey. “She never shied away from extra work. But she used to feel a little scared when her father came to the hockey ground. She used to freeze. Ultimately, I had to tell him to stay away from my academy,” says Siwach.
The coach took Neha below her wings, offering her gear, meals and “everything else she needed”. “Once, we were playing a state-level match in Gurgaon. In the first half, she wasn’t running much. I asked her the reason and she lifted her left foot to reveal a big hole in her shoe,” Siwach says.
During the half-time break, Siwach’s husband Kuldeep, additionally a player-turned coach, ran to a close-by retailer and obtained Neha, now employed with the Railways, a brand new pair of footwear. “In the second half, she almost single-handedly ran through the opposition defence with her explosive speed and also scored a couple of goals,” Siwach says.
It is that this attribute — velocity together with the knack of scoring objectives — that noticed Neha rise via the ranks and make her worldwide debut at 18. She’s been in-and-out of the crew however below Sjoerd Marijne, the Dutch coach of the ladies’s crew, Neha has blossomed into a pointy attacker with the flexibility to slide previous the defence.
At 4-feet-9, Neha most frequently isn’t the tallest participant on the sector. But in a sport that’s more and more getting bodily, top is her weapon, Siwach says. “Her runs are not spotted easily so she can get into dangerous goal-scoring positions,” she says.

With her profession earnings, Neha now supplies monetary assist to the academy, even donating her enjoying package, footwear and hockey sticks. Recently, she and her mom moved right into a high-rise condominium advanced in Sonepat alongside the Delhi-Chandigarh freeway — an handle she shares with a number of sports activities stars, together with the Phogat sisters and Siwach herself.
That’s not all. A few rooms in Neha’s house are reserved for underprivileged gamers who prepare at Siwach’s academy and might’t afford a spot to remain — like junior India ladies’s participant Antim. “Her journey inspires me a lot. She did not have anything when she began,” Antim says. “And now, didi is taking care of us all.”