I grew up in a very small town in Bihar. A town termed “rural” by English newspapers and “pichhda” by the Hindi ones. We had basic facilities, but to dream big, you had to leave home, sometimes as early as 10 years old. While one had a choice of Engineering, Medicine and the ultimate Bihari thirst trap — civil services — sports was a distant dream, often killed in examination halls and coaching centres. There were several reasons, and a major one was the lack of a sporting hero. Maharashtra had cricketing god Sachin Tendulkar and hockey’s magician Dhanraj Pillay, Delhi had wrestling king Sushil Kumar, Haryana and Punjab had sporting heroes for every generation. Neighbouring Bengal had the prince of cricket, Sourav Ganguly; UP had magical hockey striker Mohammed Shahid, Odisha had Dilip Tirkey. South India produced sporting heroes in bulk with the likes of Rahul Dravid, P T Usha, and Anil Kumble.
Bihari kids of the 2000s and 2010s were huge sports fans and claimed M S Dhoni, but in truth, they had no sporting hero of their own. By the early 2010s, Bihar had all kinds of heroes: Revolutionaries, civil service officers, poets, journalists, academics, criminals, scamsters, fraud politicians, but not a sporting one. Given the history of Bihar, especially the years rife with crime and corruption, a sporting hero would probably have been good for the youth.
In 2026, when the world had shrunk enough to fit on a smartphone screen, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi emerged. The 15-year-old isn’t just the talk of the town but the global cricket conversation. And guess what? He is from Bihar. And he is selling jerseys and filling stadiums. A sportsperson who is Bihar’s own, unlike others who had to move to different states to move up the ladder. Not that this makes them any less Bihari, but you get the gist. Now, a kid in Bihar can look up to Sooryavanshi and think, “I can get there”. For parents, he can become a point of reference.
Growing up, sporting excellence stories would happen in faraway lands. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won a silver medal at the Olympics, Abhinav Bindra won a gold, and Vijender Singh won a boxing medal. It all looked out of reach. With the partition of Bihar and Jharkhand, the neighbouring state got all the sports centres; all that Bihar was left with was a broken ecosystem. When Shreyasi Singh, now a minister in the Bihar government, won a medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, there was a brief spark. When I started my career in sports journalism, I waited for when I would write a story about Bihar and lace it with local references and metaphors. With Sooryavanshi around, I believe the wait will soon be over. The beauty of having sporting heroes you can relate to is that they make greatness feel attainable, not aspirational. Sooryavanshi didn’t just break records — he broke the ceiling. The superhero we never had is here, and he is just getting started.
The writer is senior sub-editor, The Indian Express. pritish.raj@expressindia.com
