There are few people in this world, whose stories
when you read, makes you want to meet them. And when you meet them, you just
don’t want to let them go.
Terezinha Guilhermina is one such. She, the holder of the title of
fastest woman Paralympian on earth, is also the possessor of the most
infectious laugh and a killer attitude that I know of. My desire to meet her
was for the former reason and to not let her go was for the latter.
And so it was arranged on the day after the end of
the Paralympic Games in London, by the most gracious Fernanda Villas Boas, the
Press Relations Officer for the Brazilian team.
The entire Brazilian team, in their yellow and green
jerseys was beginning to gather in front of the Straford International station
to meet the Press. It was a nice game of spot the athlete for one who had
watched the Games with fervent madness. ‘Look there’s Daniel Dias with six gold
medals hung around him’, I squealed in excitement. ‘Oh! And that’s Alan
Oliveira, the guy who upstaged the Great Oscar Pistorious in the 200m race for
double amputees’.
And then, I spot her. The great Terezinha
Guillerhmina, something of a Paralympic legend. A multiple gold medalist from
Beijing and London in the T-11 category in the 100m, 200m and 400m events.: A
category for completely blind runners who run with a guide.
I whisked off Terezinha along with Mario, the Portuguese
translator from the rest of the Brazilian team who were clearly the toast of
the press and public alike for their stupendous performance in the London
games.
Her spunky attitude is evident from the very first sentence
she utters while recounting her childhood growing up with total lack of sight.
‘At first, I started seeing shadows and thought that was how everybody saw.
Only when I started banging into people and doors, did they realize that there
was a problem with my vision. Gradually I could see nothing.’
School, then, was not very easy as she had no
massive support from the teachers who largely wrote on the blackboard, which
she could not see. ‘Since I had to write something in my notebook to keep the
teacher happy, I wrote imaginary stuff. No wonder I failed twice in the same
class’, she says with a naughty smile. It wasn’t until a sensitive teacher came
along who read out lessons to her that she made to the next grade.
Terezinha has her older sister to thank for what she
is today. When given a choice between swimming and running at her high school,
she petitioned he sister for running shoes. It was like asking for a luxury
item from a family of twelve siblings that lived in abject poverty in a small
tenement without electricity. If not for her sister who got her those shoes,
she would never have made it to the Olympic track. Why did she not take up
swimming, I ask, out of curiosity? ‘I need a pool to swim. I can run anywhere’,
she says with her characteristic verve.
Naysayers were aplenty,
who so much as scoffed at her, when she first declared she wanted to run
competitively. ‘I will be the best in the world, wait till you see’, she told herself and the
numerous doubting Thomases. So did she go back to them and stick it in their
faces after she won her first Olympic medal, I ask. She laughs and I know that
something very spunky was about to come. ‘No. I just told them to learn to
dream as I did.’ How's that for an answer!
Terezinha, first competed in the Paralympic Games in
Athens in 2004, where she won the bronze in the 400m event. She bettered her
take home tally to a gold, silver and a bronze in 200m,100m and 400m
respectively in the Beijing games in 2008. The T-11 category is one of the toughest, in that, athletes run
with a guide runner joined at the hands, much like a three-legged race. The
guide’s job is to assist the athlete with verbal instructions to cross the
finish line. The rules also require the guide to break the leash just before
the finish to let the athlete cross before him. Needless to say, it requires
complete trust between the two as well as great communication,which is
sometimes difficult if the crowd is blowing the roof off, as they did in London.
She came to the London Games with one goal: Gold in
all the three events. Gold in 200m was already in her bag, it was 2 more to go,
when disaster struck. Her guide, Guilherme
Soares de Santana, fell before the finish line in the 400m race, which was
nothing short of heart-breaking. When I saw the race on the T.V, apart from
being devastated myself, I wondered what this meant for her last but most
crucial 100m race and more importantly for the relationship between the two.
Would they be able to put this behind them and move on?
Sport is an incredible teacher for building many
enduring, life-enriching characteristics, chief among them being ‘Pick yourself
up, dust down and move on’ or run, in this case. The very next day, Terezinha
stepped on to the 100m track, waving
and smiling complete with her funky eye-mask and beaded hair in Brazil colors, not just to win the race
but smash the world record at 12.01 seconds. In what was a very poignant moment, she then embraced her guide and
held his hands up asking the crowd to cheer him on as they both cried. The
audience responded with a well -deserved standing ovation, which brought a tear
to many an eye that evening. It was quickly followed by an impromptu Samba by
the Brazilian clean-sweep(they won silver and bronze too), true to the Brazilian philosophy, that rejects
anything tear-sodden and believes that life is one big beach party!
I ask her who her role models are, expecting someone
on the lines of Florence Griffith Joyner or Marion Jones. Pat comes a strong
reply ‘Pele and Ayrton Senna! I am always amazed by women athletes who have
male role models, even more when they’re out of their own discipline.
It is perhaps easy to see why one would have wanted
to carry on chatting with Terezinha until a thousand dusks or more. But the
team could not have a photograph with their legend missing, could they? So, she
must join them now. I had time for one last question.
Is there any desire that she has not yet fulfilled and would like to?
‘Yes’, she says. ‘To be a mum’.
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