: ‘Mom Pawned Jewellery to Fuel My Passion’: India’s First Fencer To Reach Olympics #IndiaNEWS #Sports This article has been sponsored by Rin. With the Tokyo Olympics 2021 only a few days away,

‘Mom Pawned Jewellery to Fuel My Passion’: India’s First Fencer To Reach Olympics #IndiaNEWS #Sports
This article has been sponsored by Rin.

With the Tokyo Olympics 2021 only a few days away, the country has come together to support all the athletes who are heading for the games to make India proud. The journey for many of them has not been easy with several stories waiting to be told.
This time around, all eyes on Chadalavada Anandha Sundhararaman Bhavani Devi, India’s first-ever female fencer to qualify for the Olympics, who has an incredibly heartwarming and inspiring story that is being celebrated by Rin, the detergent brand from the house of Hindustan Unilever in their latest TVC.
CA Bhavani Devi is a shining star that everyone is looking forward to seeing at the Tokyo Olympics because she has made the relatively lesser-known sport of fencing, popular among the youth and synonymous with her name.
Hailing from Tamil Nadu, Bhavani Devi was 11 years old when she discovered her life’s purpose.
A student studying in a Chennai-based school then, she had to select one sport as an extracurricular, out of six options. Most of the options were filled by the time she attempted to apply, barring a lesser-known sport called fencing.
Fascinated and motivated to join an extracurricular activity that allowed her to skip classes, Bhavani started fencing in 2004.
Little did she know that this choice would carve a glorious destiny for her, making her the first-ever Indian to qualify for the Tokyo Olympic Games in fencing.
Thanks to her remarkable feat, fencing, the lesser-known sport, is now making a mainstream debut with the entire nation waiting to witness her performance at the Tokyo Olympics scheduled to take place from 23 July to 8 August 2021.
Becoming India’s top sabre
A girl born in a middle-class family with several financial constraints, Bhavani had never even heard of fencing before 2004. It was only in school while selecting a sport extracurricular that she was introduced to it.
But even then, it was mostly the fascination of the unknown and an excuse to bunk classes that formed the crux of her initial motivation. A strenuous sport warranting the player’s absolute surrender, young Bhavani went into training unaware of the requisite hard work and sacrifice, be it mental, physical or financial. It was only after her first failure in a school competition that Bhavani discovered the fire and passion for the sport and the hunger to be the best rose within her.
Yet this was only her first hurdle. The next and a bigger one was the financial strain. Being the daughter of a priest, her family could not afford letting her train for an expensive sport like fencing. She shares that her first-ever fencing kit cost Rs 6,000 back in the day.