Heartbreak Sunday for NZ, Federer: Here are others who bounced back from agonising defeats

Last Sunday ended in heartbreak for the New Zealand team and Roger Federer. Here’s a look at how some who suffered agonising defeats bounced back.

New Zealand. Federer. Disbelieving eyes and bruised hearts. Ceremonial cigars unlit. Sport, you were Satan on Sunday.

Congratulations to England and Novak Djokovic, winners of their respective encounters. But New Zealand did not deserve to lose at Lord’s. Across town at Wimbledon, Federer deserved to win. And so the agony over their defeats outweighed the applause for their conquerors.

Professional athletes are trained to handle victory and defeat both. Above the door to Wimbledon’s Centre Court hangs a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘If---’.

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.”

However, it’s easier poeticised than done. Especially when the defeat is as crushing as Sunday, when a legacy-cementing victory is in sight, but vanishes, reducing Everest-like effort to nought. “Feel the pain, that’s how it will ease,” therapists will tell Kane Williamson’s unit or to Federer.


Holidays and the embrace of loved ones will bring more healing, as will a reminder of serious global problems, in comparison of which a sporting result is trivial.

But a part of them will be scarred for long, or forever.

Never forgotten
The great Indian sprinter Milkha Singh has still not forgotten the pain of missing out on an almost certain medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics. In the 400-metre final, the Flying Sikh made a blistering start, but slowed down to conserve himself for the finish. He never recovered and finished fourth.

“All through my life, I have been tormented by the fatal mistake I made in Rome on the day of the 400-metre race,” Singh wrote in a memoir. “The one medal I had yearned for throughout my career had just slipped through my fingers because of one small error of judgement. Even today, if I look back on my life, there are only two incidents that still haunt me — the massacre of my family during Partition and my defeat at Rome.”

The situation is worse if you are an Indian sportsman who falters in a big match against Pakistan. In the 1982 Asian Games, India lost the hockey final 7-1 against their rivals. India’s goalkeeper, Mir Ranjan Negi, was accused of having received Rs 7 lakh in bribes from Pakistan (a lakh for each goal). His story formed the basis for 'Chak De! India'.

In 1986, Chetan Sharma suffered similar castigation after he conceded a last ball six to Pakistan’s Javed Miandad in Sharjah, although he was largely spared the anti-national angle. The public, in its infinite wisdom, forgot that it was a game and overreacted to the honest mistake of a 20-year-old boy.

Negi dealt with the trauma by playing sport. Sharma continued to be a key bowler for India and became the first Indian to take a World Cup hattrick in 1987. He also began to see the lighter side of things and stopped expecting people to avoid the Sharjah question.

“Even today, it is the first thing people ask me when they meet me,” Sharma said in an interview. “Badnaami main bhi naam hai [there is fame in infamy]. God chose to make me famous like this, then I have no option. I don’t get irritated any more with the questions.”

In a TV interview many years ago, Negi said, “I feel the ground is a big stress-buster. You play golf, you play hockey, anything on the ground, and when you come to the ground you forget everything else. You just see the ball. My friends [and teammates] Joachim Carvalho, Merwyn Fernandes, they all pulled me back to the ground. ‘You must play, you must coach’, they said. I continued playing for Bombay and was playing well. Then I started coaching and continued to do so.”

Lost, but not out
Sachin Tendulkar had a bountiful career but he too stomached tough losses, especially in the ’90s when the team depended almost entirely on him. In 1999, against Pakistan in Chennai, Tendulkar batted through back spasms and heat to score a heroic century and bring India on the verge of victory.

The ones who followed him in the batting line-up could not score 17 runs all put together. In the dressing room, Tendulkar was in tears and did not come out to accept the man of the match award. Music and family — his two pillars throughout his career — helped him move on.

Few sporting defeats were as heart-rending as Jana Novotna’s against Steffi Graf in the 1993 Wimbledon final. Novotna was a point away from leading 5-1 in the last set. On the threshold of her biggest achievement, she crumbled, losing 17 of the next 21 points. An English newspaper called it a Kafkaesque self-destruction. At the presentation ceremony, Novotna famously broke down on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent, Katharine.

What helped Novotna get through was that she overnight became a crowd favourite.

“The next day, because of everything that happened during the ceremony and during the match, I was on the front page of every newspaper, I felt like a winner,” she said.

Also, she was only 25 and had the time and the serve-and-volley game to eventually win Wimbledon. She did it five years later. Handing her the winner’s trophy was the Duchess. Cancer claimed Novotna at age 49 in 2017. But she’d have been happy that the most important chapter of her short life — her Wimbledon dream — had a glorious end.