Budhia Singh, Five Years Old
Amelia Gentleman meets the boy runner:
When Budhia and I meet in Delhi he is on his way home after collecting a Little Star achievement award from a new private school in Rajasthan, where pictures of him sitting on a camel, dressed in Rajasthani costumes, were printed in local newspapers, bringing in useful advertising for the school.Here’s Dileep Premachandran on other young hopefuls:His trainer, Biranchi Das, will not say whether he was paid for the boy’s appearance at the school. Nor will he discuss Budhia’s various advertising contracts, which seem to be on hold while the court decides his fate. If he is exploiting Budhia for financial gain, he is either very bad at it or extremely parsimonious. He is certainly not spending the money on hotels. The only expensive item in the room is a tiny pair of silver-and-lime-green child’s trainers, lying among a heap of cheap adult-sized plastic flip-flops.
The girl who was rejected at a hockey training camp — “Everyone made fun of me because I’m short, but I was determined to do something in sportsâ€? — now says she can be an international marathon star. Apart from Budhia, there is someone else she looks up to. PT Usha, India’s greatest athlete, grew up in a nondescript village in coastal Kerala, was peerless on the Asian stage and went on to miss a bronze by 0.01 sec in the 400m hurdles at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984…
