When Baranica Elangovan first tried the pole vault in her second year of college, she did so with hesitation. The event, built on power and fearlessness, seemed an unlikely match for someone underweight (she weighed just 42kg, more than 10kg less than most vaulters) and unsure. But reluctance slowly turned into fascination, and then into passion. The very event she once approached cautiously became the one she could not let go of. “Progress came in fragments, but I kept at it” says Baranica, who recently broke the national record at 4.22m in the National Indoor Athletics meet at Bhubaneswar.“I started as a triple jumper,” says the 29-year-old.“I moved from Mayiladuthurai to Chennai looking to build a career in sports. Then, I began representing my college in basketball. Around that time, coach Milber Russell was searching for athletes interested in pole vault. My physical education teacher, Uma Devi at Ethiraj College, encouraged me to give it a try.”Baranica was hesitant as she thought the pole would be heavy and she would not be able to run with it. “I loved watching my seniors fly through the air during their vaults and that is when my interest began,” says Baranica. “Coach Milber thought I would not last more than a week because of the intensity of the workouts. But I started from scratch, trained sincerely, and stayed committed. I trained alongside national-record holder V S Surekha, the only Indian woman to breach the 4m barrier. She became an inspiration for me to begin my journey.”Being underweight, Baranica initially trained with only two poles. “They were standard poles, the only ones available.The poles did not suit my body weight and so I wouldn’t do well at events,” she says. After a three-year lull, Baranica won her first medal, but a knee injury six months later proved a setback, forcing her to undergo surgery, which kept her out of the game for a few years.The long wait was challenging. “There were so many moments of doubt, but I refused to let them hold me back,” she says. In 2018, at the All-India Inter University meet, she jointly broke the meet record at 3.8m, her first major victory.After six months, she was forced to undergo surgery for a grade-3 knee injury in her take-off (left) leg. She returned to competition earlier than advised, pushing through the pain.“Last year, I had back pain which troubled me for six months. My parents have always been supportive, but people around them questioned their decision to let me continue with the sport.”Baranica consistently finished in the top three at national-level competitions. “Now we have access to a variety of poles, and my coach believes that if we had them earlier, we could have focused far more on building strong basics at the start of my career. Earlier, I concentrated mainly on jumping rather than technique. That has changed,” says the TN athlete, training at the Reliance HPC in Odisha.Her goal, she says, is to be like pole vaulter Armand Duplantis. “Clearing every centimetre requires immense mental strength, and breaking one’s own records is no easy feat. What sets him apart is his excellent take-off,” says Baranica. Baranica has her eyes set on the Asian Games, which are less than six months away. Reegan on the runway Until last year, Tamil Nadu’s G Reegan was a relatively unknown name in pole vaulting circles. That changed when he clinched a joint gold with a 5.2m leap at the Inter-State Athletics Meet in Chennai. He then set a national record at 5.3m in the National Indoors recently and is now India’s third-best pole vaulter across indoor and outdoor marks.Coming from a farming family in Thanjavur, Reegan would return from school each day to help his parents by carrying sacks of produce. “I think this helped me gain raw power which helped in pole vaulting,” says the 24-year-old. Reegan says he trained with bamboo sticks in sand pits.He had some bad falls while landing in training but managed to come back strong every time.“I have had plenty of failed jumps and have escaped serious injury many times. It is hard work that has brought me here,” says Reegan.“Pole vault is as much a mental game as it is physical. You need immense self-belief.”Having cleared the Commonwealth Games qualifying mark, Reegan now has his sights on the Asian Games.
