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“I wanted my daughters to be known as an athlete’s kids, not as a disabled person’s kids”

You need a steady hand and a calm mind to aim for gold medals in shooting. Amresh Kumar Singh (44) from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh has won several in para sports. But you need nerves of steel and extraordinary presence of mind to make crucial phone calls and arrangements for blood when you’re lying on the road with a shattered right leg. That’s what Amresh did on 25 February 2017 when a speeding bus hit his motorbike head-on.
 
It was a Saturday and Amresh, a schoolteacher on election duty, had an upset tummy and decided to go home early. He left school at 12.45 for the 30 km ride. Barely half an hour later a bus came hurtling towards him and tossed him 20 feet away. A crowd gathered and some people began clicking photos but no one lifted a finger to help. “In the freezing February weather my body was burning as if someone had lit a furnace inside me,” he recalls. Bleeding profusely but conscious, he took out his phone and started making calls – to his friends, to the police (to whom he also gave the number plate of the bus), and to the ambulance service. He called his uncle and asked him to arrange for a few bottles of blood at a private hospital, Regency. He also requested him not to reveal the extent of his injuries to his pregnant wife or his mother (his father had died the previous year).
 
The ambulance arrived at 3.50 p.m. and took him to a primary health centre. Knowing it wasn’t equipped to treat such a serious wound he convinced the doctor to refer him to Regency Hospital where he knew his family would have arrived. There, after he was given painkilling shots, he asked the orthopaedic surgeon whether his leg could be saved. The answer was ‘no’; it would have to be amputated above the knee, at the hip. He said, don’t waste time, just do it.
 
When we asked Amresh about the source of his get-up-and-go spirit he said, “Maybe my resilience comes from my having always been a sportsman. I am also a devotee of Hanuman-ji who gives me my strength.” Sports entered his bloodstream when he was in Standard 4 and the family moved to the company quarters of the Power Grid Corporation, where his father Ashok Kumar Singh was a junior engineer. “The quarters had sports facilities and I started playing,” he says. “With no coaching, by Ninth Standard I had become a table tennis and badminton champion.” He was more inclined towards sports than studies. Amresh, who stands 5’4” tall, vividly remembers how he used to “run like a deer” in his younger days and clear 5’8” in high jump and 7m in long jump.
 
No surprise that he went on to do his Bachelors in Physical Education from CSJM University and won a gold medal as the topper of the 2004 batch. He became a PE coach for schools across Kanpur. Even on the day of his accident in 2017, as he lay on the hospital bed, only one thought came to his mind: he would pursue sports so that his children would see him as a sportsman and not a disabled father. He lost no time in getting a prosthetic leg fitted and he turned his mind to his old love: TT.
 
As a person with 90 per cent disability he could play wheelchair TT and he won silver at the national para games. He was chosen as part of the team representing India at the 2019 Para TT Championship in Amman, Jordan. However, other senior players began to murmur, sending mails to the authorities saying since he could stand upright with his artificial leg he shouldn’t be allowed to play in a wheelchair. Amresh was thoroughly depressed, and did not play for a whole year.
 
Meanwhile he took up shooting, in which he excelled. In January and February 2019 he took part in air rifle and air pistol shooting competitions, winning six gold, a silver and a bronze. He also started learning to play TT standing; he worked really hard and played matches, getting fourth place in ’22, silver in ’23 and bronze in ’24, but no gold, which was a disappointment. He remembered that during the Jordan episode he had been asked to get an international medical review done, and so he applied for one. To his delight he was assigned ‘Class 4’ which meant he could play TT in a wheelchair. “So life came full circle,” he says. “My target is to win gold in TT in the 2028 Olympics.”
 
Individual glory is not Amresh’s sole aim; besides his job as a school teacher he has been vigorously encouraging disabled persons to take up sports as a career; he coaches them in shooting and TT and is proud to see them perform excellently at the state, national and international levels. It started with his brother Abhishek, two years younger than him and a polio survivor. After his accident he motivated Abhishek to take up para TT and he is now ranked number two in India.
 
Amresh is also coaching his daughters Aradhya (11) and Aditri (7). Aradhya has already started winning medals in shooting; her father’s “target is to make her an Olympic champion”. Aditri is being coached in TT and will move to shooting once she reaches the qualifying age, 10. “My life is incomplete without my wife Manjula, who takes care of everything” says Amresh. She is a teacher and they are “50-50 partners”.
 
“Now that I am good at both TT and shooting, I need to decide which one am I better at,” Amresh says, “so that I can represent the country and win an Olympic gold.”