If you don’t see silver linings around dark clouds as a coping mechanism after missing gold, then silver can morph into several things.
Like a needle stuck in the skin.
Nitesh Kumar had won gold at the Paris Paralympics. It should have counted as the ultimate achievement, the pinnacle. But it bothered him that he had finished with silver at the Hangzhou Asian Para Games in 2023, a year before Paris. That loss rankled, enough to beat the post-gold motivation crisis that strikes many champions. It made the 2026 Nagoya Asian Para Games a goal he lost sleep over.
Nitesh likes a good, proper roti with sabzi, but he gave up regular North Indian fare altogether for dinner, switching to salads in rice bowls. The silver needle pricked till he finally won, in straight sets, 21-18, 21-16, against Pramod Bhagat in the SL3 final.
“It felt like the needle had finally come out,” he said, of a gold that was more than just an upgrade on last time.
Nitesh lost his left lower limb in a train accident; Pramod struggled after polio weakened his leg. At the elite sporting level though, where competitive juices flow and have made India absolutely dominant in the SL3 and SL4 categories, the two are rivals.
Nitesh Kumar, right, and Pramod Bhagat, after winning gold and silver medals respectively in men’s singles SL3 event at the Asian Para Games, in Nagoya, Japan. (PCI Photo)
Does he see this as a passing of the baton? Bhagat is a former Paralympic champion, and won his sixth world singles title earlier this year. He is “Pramod bhaiyya” to Nitesh, a senior he has respected since his 2018 Asian Para Games gold and is fond of, because he always helped him generously. They gang up to pull pranks on team-mates, and tag-team on banter. They beat back upcoming talents from Korea and Indonesia in the semi-finals to line up an all-India final.
Yet on the court, with gold at stake, the battle got super-tactical. “Winning in straight sets against Pramod bhaiyya in finals doesn’t happen. I just kept telling myself to be positive,” Nitesh said, as the silver needle pinched deeper. When one smash landed in the net, and another wide, he knew impatience could hand this over to Pramod, whose experience and patience help him outlast most challengers.
Then he began trapping the senior with drops, restricting his attack and pushing him into defence, while changing his stance to push the shuttle to the second line, from where Nitesh could convert. “I made him run a lot. But the drops trapped him. These were the sort of mistakes we made, now it was him,” Nitesh said. Even at Paris, he had tried playing uncharacteristically, with long rallies and the like, “before my original style kicked in”. And he kept working.
He ran with the passed baton. But the track, he reminds, is circular. And Bhagat isn’t done. Nor is the rest of the field: Englishman Daniel Bethell and a surfeit of talent from Thailand to Japan and from Korea to Indonesia are staking a claim to the hyper-competitive SL3 title.
Exactly when it got so crazy is hard to pin down, but SL3 has some of the most motivated men, going to insane lengths to challenge for global titles. Bethell moved back to his hometown so that organising practices himself would fuel his motivation. Nitesh put in heavy off-season lifting to build strength reserves. It was that fortitude that pushed him when he trailed in the second set, brought it level and finally staved off a Bhagat comeback by holding his nerve.
A wrist injury, after he won three golds at the Asian Championships, kept him from challenging for gold at the Worlds. But when the duo faced off at Nagoya, Nitesh finally had the needle out of his skin.
A missed Olympic gold has prolonged PV Sindhu’s career, kept her hungry and motivated one Olympics after another. Her two World Championships silvers had earlier pushed her game to explore facets she wouldn’t have otherwise. Now, even as her peers fade out, Sindhu has found a second wind. The silver had pricked hard there too.
For Nitesh, just the memory of losing that final back in 2023 at the Asiad was enough to keep him going. It’s a box ticked. A gold that’s hard-earned.