Long jumper Shaili Singh ready to take off, again

Soon after checking into the Anju Bobby High-Performance Centre in Bengaluru last June, Shaili Singh shut out the world, cranked up Punjabi beats in her room, sobbed, and danced.

- Shantanu Srivastava

NEW DELHI: It was the 21-year-old's way of letting go of pent-up frustration and dealing with the mental demons that had swamped her otherwise vivacious spirit.

Sure, she told herself to look at the bigger picture -- that it was an injury-ravaged season, that she was still young, that breaking the 20-year-old national record of her mentor Anju (6.83m) was always going to be a tall order -- but the mind never stopped ticking.

"It was a bad phase. I felt I had let myself and my family down," she remembers. The gnawing sense of worthlessness also meant Shaili didn't go home during the Olympics, because she felt her mother didn't deserve to see her "broken and wailing."

She watched the Olympics in solitude, often wondering what could have been had her body held up in the crucial months leading up to the Games in Paris. The epic men's javelin final provided some succour, but Shaili repeatedly found herself being sucked into a spiral of pessimism.