August 8, 1984, four days before the closing ceremony of the glittering XXIII Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The finals of the women's 400 meters hurdles, which features, in lane 5, the very first Indian woman in the finals of any Olympic event, are about to be concluded. The gunshot goes off and the twenty-year-old from lane 5, aware of carrying with her the hopes of an entire sporting and non-sporting nation on her tall and angular body, starts strong, but stops for two seconds Someone made a false start and the race must begin again. The girl, a little shaken, returns to the starting blocks and tries to concentrate. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay The previous day, she had run her semifinal at 55, 54 and won the heat (a feat no other Indian female Olympic athlete has been able to repeat in the next 33 years), forcing the American television commentator to sit up and take notice, to recognize that "Yoosha" was a favorite not just for the podium, but - hold your breath - a gold medal. The gun fires again, and this time there is no looking back. The girl runs the race of her life, stopping the clock at 55.42 and, in the process, setting a national record that still stands today, but proving a hundredth of a second too late to reach the finish line. story he had hoped for. It is a heartbreaking repeat of another 4th place, that of a quarter of a century earlier, at the 1960 Rome Olympics, where the Indian contender, Milkha Singh, had finished a tenth of a second behind the bronze medal winner. “I cried and cried, for days,” the 54-year-old chuckles, recalling her distraught young self in a recent interview. You can't help but marvel at that giggle – so light, so free of bitterness and resentment, so free of the shadow of regret one would expect from an athlete who has climbed every peak she has attempted in her personal quest for sporting excellence. Every peak, that is, except one. The lightness of Usha's giggle - since we are obviously talking about none other than the Payyoli Express, our Golden Girl, the great PT Usha - stands out particularly clearly when compared against the backdrop of the handshakes and collective beatings to which the country has subjected itself after the 1984 Olympics, when the Indian team – a meager contingent of just 48 of our best, down from the 76 who had been sent to the Moscow Games, much boycotted four years earlier, returned without medals. The cruelest cut was that the much-hyped men's hockey team, which had won gold in eight Olympics, including Moscow, had placed a humiliating fifth place (to rub salt in Los Angeles' wound, Pakistan won the gold). just a sample. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay The self-loathing was especially acute because of what had come before. Just two years earlier, national pride had hit an all-time high following the success of the 1982 Delhi Asian Games, which had seen the capital transform and bring in world-class sports infrastructure and international coaches en masse for the benefit of Indian sportspeople. That pride, further strengthened by India's haul of 57 medals, had caused the expectations of the contingent that participated in the 1984 Games to reach stratospheric – and completely unreasonable – levels. Furthermore, in 1983, Kapil Dev's men had won the Cricket World Cup, raising hopes even higher - after all, if we could be.