The gold medal that boxer Vikas Krishan Yadav won in the 69kg welterweight category at the South Asian Games in Nepal a couple of days ago isn't a prize the 27-year-old rates particularly high in his list of achievements. That's understandable considering Krishan is one of Indian boxing's most decorated competitors of all time. The two-time Olympian has gold medals at the Asian and Commonwealth Games and a bronze at the World Championships. Yet the latest win, even at a minor regional tournament, featuring opponents from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, has its significance.
"It's not a big tournament but I needed to compete here. I needed to get into the competition feeling again," says Krishan, who arrived in India a day ago.
The South Asian Games were Krishan's first competition for India in over a year. Shortly after winning a bronze medal at the Asian Games last year, he had signed with the promotional organisation Top Rank, as he pursued a career as a professional prize fighter in the USA. Two fights and as many wins later though he had decided to make his return to India in his bid to compete at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
For all his success, Krishan couldn't just walk back to the Indian team when he returned in July this year. He had developed a stress fracture in his back that he had to get treated. When he did begin training at the national camp, he found that he had to unlearn a lot of the skills he had picked up as a professional fighter.
"It was strange because I first had to change a lot of things when I became a professional fighter," he says. "Over there, you have to pace yourself because there are many more rounds in a fight compared to just three in the amateur system. The gloves are smaller so your punches are much heavier. You also can't block the opponent with them so much. I was slowly learning all of that but when I got back to India, I had to forget all of that. I had to learn to fight at a much higher pace."
The biggest challenge was simply to get used to sparring once again. "In the USA as a professional, I mostly did a lot of pad and bag work and only sparred with opponents maybe seven or eight times before fights," he says. "In India we can have those many sparring sessions in a week. I was completely out of touch in the ring."
The solution, Krishan felt, wasn't to get slowly back into his step. "I knew I had to get as much sparring practice as possible," he says. "So I went with my friend [professional boxer Neeraj Goyat] to the IIS [the privately run Indian Institute of Sports] in Bellary where I was able to speed up my training."
It wasn't all negative for Krishan though. If he had to unlearn certain aspects of his training as a professional, he also developed confidence from other skills he had picked up. "The biggest advantage for me now is that I know how to get in shape physically," he says.
By his own admission, Krishan wasn't the hardest working member of the Indian team. "I never trained how I should have in the past," he says. "If the coaches told me to go for a 5km run, I'd sometimes just run for 3km. If we had to take part in four round of sparring, I'd only do three and say, 'Coach, I'm tired.' I'd justify it to myself thinking I only have to fight for three rounds in the ring. I felt I was good enough to win international medals so what I did was working."
The unwillingness to train any more than the bare minimum meant that Krishan settled into the 75kg middleweight division in 2014, choosing not to put in the effort to attempt making the weight cut to the 69kg welterweight division, in which he might have enjoyed even more success. "When I went to the 2016 Olympics [where he reached the quarterfinals], I was just 71.5kg," he says. "I was one of the smallest guys in that division."
The grind of professional training turned all that around. "I was working so hard that I dropped down into welterweight without even having to watch what I was eating," says Krishan. "The weight just went away. In fact my coaches were confident I could be competing for the welterweight title."
Indeed, while he's now lighter on his feet, Krishan will now be able to carry more power into the lighter weight class. "I was discussing with coach Santiago [Nieva] about just how confident I was feeling," he says. "I know I am going to be the stronger boxer when I step into the ring now. And if there is someone who can take my punches, I'm always going to be able to beat them with my movement."
Krishan is grateful that he got the opportunity to box in Nepal. His was a surprise pick considering he hadn't competed even at the boxing nationals last month -- he reckons he was instead picked on the basis of his record (14-1 -- the one loss to Cuba's Olympic champion Arlen Lopez) in amateur bouts since the start of 2018. But he plans to earn the right to compete at the Olympic qualification tournament in February.
"The goal is very clear in my head," Krishan says. "I have to compete in the Olympics and win a medal there. But first I have to qualify. For that I'll have to win the trials for the selection to the Indian team to compete there. There are some good boxers but I'm very confident about my ability now. I missed a few months because I was fighting as a professional but it is all for the best. I have the best of both the styles now. I'm a professional amateur now."