The struggles of a legend

KATHMANDU, April 19: He was born to succeed and named victory. But Jit Bahadur KC, who did do justice to his name and win Nepal her first ever international medal, had to work even harder to replicate that success in the marathon called life. [break]

KC ran almost 40 km of his marathon in the First Asian Track and Field Championship in Manila, Philippines in 1973 on bare feet to claim the bronze medal behind two South Koreans. But he has had to trudge a greater distance of hardship in his life.

“It rained heavily in the initial stages and I had to throw away my old pair of shoes after a few kilometers,” the 59-year-old legend recalls. He then had to bear the brunt of the scorching heat and literally burn his feet on the steaming black-topped road to complete the later half of the race. “My feet were bleeding due to the heat and exertion,” KC adds.

He deservedly came home to a hero’s welcome and was paraded around the Valley. The National Sports Council gave him a bumper cash bonus of Rs 500. And the government dangled before the army jamadar born in Charikot, Dolakha the ultimate dream of a house in Kathmandu, mouja (a big chunk of land) in the tarai and a dollop of Rs 10 per day as pocket money.

But the promised dream never materialized.

He followed his historic feat with Nepal’s second international medal, a bronze in the Second Asian Track and Field Championship in South Korea in 1975, but it failed to recreate the initial hysteria.

He even spent some months of his post retirement life after the Eighth Asian Games in Bangkok, Thailand in 1978, calling on the higher authorities to restore his lost dream. But he had to make do with a modest job of assistant coach with the National Sports Council. “It was very hard to raise four sons and a daughter in rented rooms with that salary,” he reminisces.

He has been promoted to a coach now and earns around Rs 13,000 per month but that does little justice to a man who put Nepal on the international sporting map. “This salary is peanuts with no scope for bribes,” he quips.

The government may have been frugal in rewarding his feat but KC is glad that the toils of his younger days were eventually rewarded. “An American came as a savior to reward me for my hardships,” he says.

His son had gone to the US Embassy in Kathmandu to apply for a visa about 10 years ago with newspaper clippings on his father’s heyday. Luckily for the KCs the consular official turned out to be a fellow marathoner who had run with Jit Bahadur in the Munich Olympics in 1972. The official recognized him from the photos and asked the son to return a couple of days later with his father.

The son got the visa that ultimately changed the KCs’ lives. Jit Bahadur finally has his much cherished house in Kathmandu but it still rankles that it required charitable recognition from a foreigner to change his lot in life.

premdhakal@myrepublica.com