Satara Labourer's Son Aims At Oly Bullseye

Unlike the gods on TV, his son uses bows and arrows made of something heavier and far more expensive than wood.

But construction labourer Ramesh Jadhav (50) does not know it’s called fibreglass. The father of two who earns Rs 300 a day and has never ventured outside Satara’s Phaltan taluka also doesn’t know much about Tokyo apart from the fact that his armyman son, the one he could never afford shoes for, is now aiming for an Olympic medal there, reports Sharmila Ganesan.

“I hope he inspires other boys from the village to come back with an Olympic,” the unlettered Jadhav of the drought-ridden Sarade village said to PM Narendra Modi in Marathi recently on a televised video call meant to encourage 24-year-old Pravin, the undernourished- child-turned-barefooted-sprinter-turned-international-archery champion, who is the first from the state to qualify for the Olympics in men’s recurve. Implied in the rustic father’s hope was the word ‘medal’—the thing that used to collect in a gunny sack in his hut.

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