CWG 2022: Working as farm hand and cook, single mother of four daughters raises champion weightlifter | Sports News,The Indian Express
With coach Boruah training 12 kids with a single weightlifting set, Popy would spend three hours in the morning and three in the evening training with village girls and boys.
Back in 2018, Popy Hazarika came back to the Sports Authority of India (SAI) hostel in Golaghat, Assam with a newspaper advertisement about recruitment in Assam Police and sat down with her friend and room-mate Dimpi Dutta to discuss leaving the hostel and opting for the physical test and recruitment process.
With her mother being the sole bread-winner in the family including her three elder sisters, Popy was worried about the financial aspect and thought about quitting weightlifting for an Assam Police job in an effort to support her family. But as the 23-year-old now aims to win a medal in the women’s 59Kg category at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, she recalls that day when she contemplated giving up the sport to support her family.
“Training kar kar ke thak gayi thi. Bus apni mother ke liye kuch karna chahti thi (I was tired training all the time. I wanted to do something for my mother). That’s why I seriously thought about giving the Assam Police recruitment a try before my friend Dimpi and coaches sat with me and made me think about my weightlifting career. I understood that it’s a long wait in any sport and if my mother can support four of us all these years, I could not leave weightlifting midway,” Popy remembers.
The youngest of four siblings, Popy lost her father at the age of 10 in an electricity mishap at their home in Namti Salkathoni village in Assam’s Sivasagar district. The youngster, who would initially opt for discus and javelin throw at the village school, does not remember much about the fateful day except for relatives and friends coming to their home. Her father worked as a driver and was preparing for the day’s shift when he suffered electric shock while washing the vehicle. “I was playing with my sisters when somebody told that our father had suffered an electric shock while washing his vehicle. When we came out, we saw his body in the water on the road and later were told that he was no more. My mother made sure that we attended school days after our father’s death as she knew that that was the only way we could achieve our dreams.”
A meeting with Dimpi in 2013 would result in Popy accompanying the aspiring weightlifter to the weightlifting hall at the Swahid Peoli Phukan College near their village to train under coach Duljit Boruah. While the youngster would win medals in athletics in her school, mother Dipti picked up a cook’s job at the village school apart from working as a daily wager in rice fields during the paddy season. With the family owning a small piece of land, Dipti would also work on it to make ends meet.
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