Eight golds, nine silvers, one Varanasi dojo: 17 Kashi karatekas come home with national medals

Seventeen children who train at one Varanasi academy went to Lucknow this week and every one of them came back with a medal. At the national karate championship held at the KD Singh Babu Stadium on 22 and 23 August, students of the Satyanarayan Karate Academy took eight golds and nine silvers between them. The gold medallists were Amayra Singh, Trisha Singh, Naitik Yadav, Shivesh Yadav, Vijay Yadav, Anaisha Singh, Vivek Sahu and Aman Vishwakarma. Krishna Sonkar, Adeep Singh, Arya Singh, Ishan Shukla, Shivam Singh and Durgesh Yadav were among those who finished with silver. The medals came across age groups, which is the part coaches tend to be quietest about and proudest of — a club with results in one bracket has a good year, a club with results in several has a system. Karate has been quietly building a base in the city for a while. Earlier this month 279 karatekas from 80 schools weighed in at Sonarpura for the school-level competition, with the girls taking the mat first; the same pipeline is what eventually puts names on a national medals list. For families weighing an after-school sport, the practical takeaway is simple enough: Varanasi now has a dojo whose students are landing on national podiums, and the road from a school mat to that podium runs through the city itself.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Amar Ujala — Varanasi