By Bharat Sharma, IANS,
New Delhi : If you thought only athletes in India find it hard to make a living out of sports and are forced to pick up a job later on in their career, here is a reality check. The situation also prevails in a leading sporting country like Australia.
Athletes who represent Australia in lesser known sports like table tennis and weightlifting, say it is impossible to make both ends meet if they only focus on the sport.
William Henzell, Australia’s number one table tennis player with a world ranking of 122, decided to stop playing professionally on the tour two years ago and took up a job of a software engineer in the cosmopolitan Melbourne city.
Playing table tennis full time, William used to earn 5,000 Australian dollars in a calender year and now he takes home a handsome pay packet of 30,000 Australian dollars a year.
“The Table Tennis Federation back home does not have the money to fund my all pro tour expenses. You need to play around 15 international tournaments annually to be competitive, and I could only play four to five events. I did not see any point in carrying on as a TT professional and started working,” William told IANS.
Asked how does he balance between the game and his job, the 28-year-old said: “Earlier I used to practice five hours a day and now I manage 15 hours in a week. It is hard to manage the two together but now I possess all the things I desired as a teenager.”
William is here to compete in the Commonwealth Games and was a silver medallist in the Melbourne edition four years ago.
Another Aussie who is making news in the Indian capital is woman weightlifter Seen Lee.
Seen, who won a silver medal in the 58kg category Wednesday, is a climate engineer back home in Victoria.
The 27-year-old reveals that a woman weightlifter is looked down upon in a country like Australia and while she was in the sport full time, she used to earn five percent of what she is earning now.
“People stare at you as if you are not supposed to lift weights as a woman. I had to start working sooner than later. You can’t make a living out of a sport like weightlifting,” Seen told IANS.
The Chinese origin lifter says she can’t leave either the sport and her job and her social life has gone for a toss.
“Well, I don’t have a social life. That’s the price you pay for running the family,” Seen said of her ordeal.