- With the World Cup race lined up in the first week of May 2022, Geeta is now looking for sponsorship from both the government and private entities to make her dream come true.
NE SPORTS BUREAU
AHMEDABAD, MARCH 29
Where there is a wheel, there is a way has come true for an Amdavadi woman with steely hearts – Geeta S Rao. With her indomitable spirit, Rao has scripted history by becoming the first-ever woman from Gujarat to win a cycling medal at an international event. She won the silver medal at the Individual Time Trial Road cycling race at the 2022 Asian Road & Para Cycling Championship held in Dushanbe, Tajikistan on Friday. She covered the 15-km distance in 36:07.721 minutes.
Geeta’s left leg is completely paralyzed due to polio in her childhood. Road cycling event for able bodied is a dangerous sport, with one or more elite cyclist dying every year on the road. Geeta has fallen off so many times that she has injuries from head to toe. She does not let that defy the audacious goals that she has set for her.
Since learning cycling in 2016 in her late thirties, she hasn’t looked back once. She has so far covered over 80,000 km in cycling in six years’ time which is equivalent to circling the Earth twice. In the beginning, she wasn’t even able to ride 200 metres, but today she does long endurance rides called Brevets organized under the aegis of Paris-based Audax Club Parisien Randonneur. A person who does 200, 300, 400 and 600 km separate rides in a single cycling year (November to October) done in a single self-supported stretch in a specified number of hours is called a Super Randonneur (or SR for short).
Differently abled have to follow the same rules and cut-off times as the able bodied people. Geeta scripted history and got her name registered in the Limca Book of Records in December 2017. She did the entire SR series in 43 days and became India’s first differently-able cyclist. In the year 2020-21, she bettered her record by finishing two SRs in the same year. She also completed a 1000 km brevet in January this year from Vadodara to Dholavira and back in 73 hours 30 minutes straight riding.
Geeta finished 1st at the national selection trials for the Indian team held at Hyderabad last month. Due to non-availability of cycling coaches in Ahmedabad, Pratap Mohan, father and coach of Ahmedabad based international athlete Pragnya Mohan volunteered to train her for the upcoming Asian championship. Her speeds improved from 25 kmph to 28 kmph on flat roads.
Geeta and her team had spent the last 3 out of 4 nights at airports and in trains to reach Dushanbe. She suffered from diarrhoea her entire travel journey and was still feeling weak before the race. The biggest setback came to her only minutes before the race. While warming up, she fell and her cycling shoes soul tore. This meant she had to use her regular sports shoes on special cycling pedals called cleats (which are much smaller in size). She rode the entire race on them and had to adjust her paralyzed left leg 4 times within the race when it had fallen off the pedal. She was constantly experiencing dizziness and weakness. Despite that she did a strong finish in hilly terrains, high elevation and crosswinds of Dushanbe to finish second behind Azizakhon Kosimova of Uzbekistan. Having put her all, she fell from exhaustion after the race and spent a better part of the hour inside an ambulance before seeing the tri-colour flag rise at the prize ceremony.
According to her coach, Pratap Mohan, “Geeta has tremendous potential and is an extremely good student picking up things fast. She is fully dedicated and into the sport. You get a feel that she enjoys cycling like children enjoy the freedom associated with it. The next step is to participate in the World Cups and World Championships and I believe that she will win the first-ever Olympics medal in cycling for India at 2024 Paris Paralympics.”
With the World Cup race lined up in the first week of May 2022, Geeta is now looking for sponsorship from both the government and private entities to make this dream come true.
