Mumbai: Mallakhamb didn’t make it to the Olympics, but the sport is booming in J -an | Mumbai news

Not transition. Transaction. This is what the interval between one gravity defying position and the next in Mallakhamb is called, tells us Dadar-based Himani Parab. As one of two Mallakhamb world champions from Mumbai selected this year to demonstrate the local sport at the Tokyo Olympics, the 20-year-old parab had spent the last month doing signature transactions on a rope in Shivaji Park with the 24-year-old athlete Deepak Shinde, who coll -sed from his typical handstand into a shoulder plank on the nearby teak pole in the run-up to the graduation ceremony. But when the invitation from Tokyo failed to materialize, the hopes of these rubber athletes also needed a fall mat.
“India last demonstrated Mallakhamb at the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany,” says Shinde, referring to the time when an unofficial team of muscle men from Amravati impressed Hitler with their indigenous movements. “He even gave them a medal,” says Shinde, dejected at the loss of an opportunity that had arisen after 85 years. Had things gone according to plan, Shinde, who won two gold and three silver medals at the 2019 Mallakhamb World Championship (MWC) in Mumbai, would have led the men’s team, while Parab, who won four gold and two bronze medals at the MWC, would have led a seven-man women’s team in Tokyo last week. At the suggestion of the Mallakhamb Federation of India (MFI), which together with the non-profit Mallakhamb Federations of the USA (MFU) and J -an (MFJ) had  -proached the International Olympic Committee about the possibility of a demonstration of the indigenous game in Tokyo, a A double vaccinated squad of 14 players, eight coaches and officials from the corners of Rajasthan, Amravati and Chattisgarh were ready to impress the world with what MFJ’s Vivek Sable calls “perfect practice”. “Unlike gyms, which use different pieces of equipment for different parts of the body, here two pieces of equipment work on the entire body – the bar and the rope,” says Sable.
At the moment, J -an has 15 trained Mallakhamb athletes thanks to MFJ, which was registered as a nonprofit earlier this year. If logistical challenges mean that the country has only imported a 2.4-meter-long teak mallakhamb mast from India, the language barrier makes importing Indian coaches superfluous. What helps promote the sport in this scenario is the recent celebrity of cheese naan loving acrobatic pole dance gold medalist Keiko Takemoto. After returning from Mumbai in 2019 with three Mallakhamb World Championship medals – two golds in the Mallakhamb pole in the women’s short and long set and one bronze in the all-round category – it caught the attention of major J -anese news channels, while some J -anese schools watched a video of their Mallakhamb World Championship Tour as part of “Lessons on Indian Culture”.
Takemoto, a fellow at Tokyo University, was searching deeply for stamina and muscle strength when she stumbled upon Mallakhamb on a video platform in 2012. The magic of the controlled yoga poses was immediately noticeable. “Between 2012 and 2015, I traveled to India six times to train,” says Takemoto, who, among other “elements” (poses) at academies in Mumbai and Pune, also performed the Bajrangi while her washboard abs performed cultural descents. “I made sushi for an Indian family and tried pani puri,” says Takemoto, who now allows herself to eat cheese naan and buttered chicken masala twice a week in Indian restaurants in J -an while they are preparing for the closest to an otherwise strict diet is holding Mallakhamb World Cup. In 2022 in New York, the audience at this event will also be members of the International Olympic Committee, Sable suggests.
Despite this international spotlight – Prime Minister Narendra Modi even spoke about the growing  -peal of the sport in the US on his latest Mann Ki Baat show – job search remains a struggle for most Mallakhamb athletes in the state, emphasizes Shinde, who does with his résumé since last year the offices of the sports authorities. “In states like MP and Karnataka, mallakhamb athletes automatically qualify nationally for government jobs, but in Maharashtra, where the sport was born, Mallakhamb has not yet made it onto the list of direct recruitment games,” said the 24-year-old who finds his MCom award as financially useless as his gleaming Mallakhamb World Championship medals. Would it be different if Mallakhamb made the Olympic list as a participating sport, like J -an’s skateboarding did this year? Shinde doesn’t know. “But at least our medal balance would improve,” he says.