Seven-year-old Gokul Sivakumar was starry-eyed as he watched his elder brother put on his roller skates and spin gloriously at international tournaments. He soon asked his parents to enroll him into a class. Now, within three years of his experience, nine-year-old Gokul has won 18 medals at the district, State and National level tournaments, the latest being the silver medal at the National Roller Sports Championship that concluded on Monday in Noida.
“I love artistic roller skating because it has dancing in it. I practice for two hours daily and I’m very happy that I won! My brother is my role model. I got selected through district level and was competing with 12 others in the solo dance category at the Nationals. My mother just asked me to go have fun at the tournament. I don’t think she expected that I would return with a medal,” he says.
Mahalakshmi Sivakumar, Gokul’s mother, agrees. “He is extremely jovial and energetic. My husband and I were glad when he said he wanted to take up skating, because I thought this would help him channel his energy into something productive, but I honestly didn’t think he would be so serious about it,” she says and explains, “No one reached the average of 6 and above to get the gold medal. Gokul and another contestant from Andhra Pradesh tied for silver, at around 5.7 points.”
Gokul’s father, Sivakumar, says that his coaches and choreographers are to be credited. “Gokul is being trained by Arjuna awardee Anup Kumar Yama and Amar Nag Yama, and his choreographer for the winning dance was Nitish. They saw that Gokul took to skating like a fish to water. He also likes karate and boxing. We don’t think that he is missing out on much of his childhood because of the sport, as he attends school regularly. But, most of our family is in Chennai, so we miss spending time with them anyway. The only thing is that if we are all meeting to celebrate a festival, he could be busy training or travelling, but that is a miniscule inconvenience compared to what he is hoping to do,” he says.
Gokul also toured around Delhi after his winning tournament and says that he will be training even harder for the upcoming district level, so he gets selected again and clenches the gold medal at the Nationals next time.
