Sindhu 1st Indian woman to win 2 Oly medals, men's hockey team in semis

Squad One Win Away From 1st Medal In 41 Yrs

- Siddharth Saxena

It’s Coming Home,’ got an Indian makeover on Sun-day. Old world spirit and a new age women’s rising gave it a wholly homespun flavour.

Here’s how. The Indian hockey team, first, which was rekindling long-forgotten Olympic nostalgia by making the semifinals after nearly half a century, when a major chunk of our current population was not even born.

Coming, somewhat fittingly, at the expense of our former imperial masters, Great Britain, the fluent 3-1 victory tells us that India is a win away from reclaiming a corner of the Olympic field that was once our living room, complete with wicker sofa-set, black and white TV behind a crochet cover and medals in the shelf above.

Then, equally significantly, if not more, PV Sindhu was staking claim to being India’s greatest-ever individual Olympian — across gender, and possibly generations too.

Her face a strange mix of quiet grit and menace, on Sunday, Sindhu was in a mood to take no prisoners, demolishing China’s bewildered-looking He Bing Jiao in less than an hour for her second Olympic medal, an equally precious bronze this time that followed her Rio silver.

“I’m on Cloud Nine,” Sindhu would exclaim later, but would also speak of undying ambition, “I had a lot of emotions going through me — should I be happy that I won bronze or sad that I lost the opportunity to play in the Olympics final?”