Chennai’s growing Boccia community celebrates friendship, while winning laurels along the way

Boccia players from Chennai make sure to not skip a Saturday training session, are racking up prizes along the way.

Lakshmi Prabha smiles as she hands out bars of chocolate to the small group scattered around the auditorium at Vidya Sagar, an organisation that works with persons of disability, in Kotturpuram. The chairs have been pushed aside and trainer Sathish Kumar is moving about on his wheelchair, getting chalk lines marked on the wooden floor, for a court.

The sweet treats, laughter and chatter is a Saturday fixture for a small but growing community in Chennai that comes together to play boccia every week.

This Saturday, the treats are courtesy of Lakshmi’s recent victory at the eighth Boccia National Championship in Gwalior. She holds up her gold medal, which she won in the individual category.

“This is a sport I can play comfortably from my wheelchair. I was thrilled to go to the Nationals and win,” she says. “I come here every week and have made many friends,” adds Lakshmi.

Boccia was first introduced in 1984 at the Paralympics in New York as acompetitive sport and at present, is one among two sports in the world that does not have an Olympic counterpart. The sport can be played individually, as a pair, or as a team and has categories for the same. Over the last few years, organisations working with persons with disabilities across the country, have taken up the cause of this interesting sport.

Back in 2016, Rajiv Rajan, executive director, Ektha (a disabled peoples’ organisation), and Sathish Kumar, the current boccia programme coordinator, both from Chennai, embarked on a journey to make persons with disabilities in the city, aware of the existence of this Paralympic sport. They believed that boccia would be a turning point for people who were unable to do other activities independently.

“It was originally designed for people with cerebral palsy. At present however, persons with a wide range of disabilities who use wheelchairs, enjoy playing the sport,” Sathish says. “There is a lot of mind, and hand-and-eye coordination involved.”