August 8, 1984, four days before the closing ceremony of the scintillating 23rd Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The women's 400m hurdles finals, featuring the first ever Indian woman to compete in the final of an Olympic event in lane 5, are about to be announced. The starting gun rings out and the 20-year-old young woman in lane 5, aware that she carries on her tall, angular figure the hopes of an entire nation passionate about sport and not sport, starts strong, but stops two seconds later. . Someone made a false start and the race must be restarted. Her concentration somewhat shaken, the young girl returns to the starters and forces herself to concentrate. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The day before, she had run her semi-final at 55.54 and won the series (a feat no other Indian woman has done (the Olympic athlete has been able to do it again in the 33 years since), forcing the American television commentator to sit up and take notice, to acknowledge that "Yoosha" was one of the favorites not only for a podium, but - hold your breath - a gold medal The gun goes off at. again, and this time there is no turning back The young girl runs the race of her life, stopping the clock at 55:42 and thus establishing a national record which still stands today, but it s. turns out to be a hundredth of a second too late to achieve the kind of race of a lifetime she had hoped for. It was a heartbreaking repeat of another 4th place finish. a quarter of a century earlier, at the 1960 Rome Olympics, where Indian competitor Milkha Singh finished a tenth of a second behind the bronze medalist. “I cried and cried for days,” laughs the 54-year-old, remembering her distraught youth, in a recent interview. We can't help but marvel at this laughter – so light, so free of bitterness and resentment, so devoid of the shadow of regret that one would expect from an athlete who has climbed all the peaks that she attempted in her personal quest for sporting excellence. Every vertex, that is, except one. The lightness of Usha's laughter - because, of course, we have been talking about none other than the Payyoli Express, our Golden Girl, the great PT Usha - stands out particularly clearly when compared to the context of the collective suffering that the country endured after the 1984 Olympics, when the Indian team – a lean and mean contingent of just 48 of our best, pruned from the 76 who had been sent to the much-boycotted Moscow Games four years earlier, were returned without any medal. The cruelest cut was that the vaunted men's hockey team, which had won gold at eight Olympics, including Moscow, placed fifth (to rub salt in the wound of Los Angeles, Pakistan won gold). Keep in mind: This is only a sample.Get a custom paper now from our expert writers.Get a Custom EssaySelf-loathing was particularly acute because of what had happened before. Two years earlier, national pride had reached an all-time high following the success of the 1982 Delhi Asian Games, which saw the capital transformed and welcoming world-class sports infrastructure and international coaches en masse for the benefit of Indian athletes. . This pride, further enhanced by India's 57 medals, had allowed the expectations of the contingent that went to the 1984 Games to reach stratospheric – and entirely unreasonable – heights. Additionally, in 1983, Kapil's men..