The thank you it’s an awesome sport. It involves doing athletic exercises in a kind of aerial yoga on a pole made of sissu rosewood, a tree from India, polished with oil. It is a tall pole, 2.6 meters and 55 centimeters wide. There is also a female version in which a hanging rope is used, although more and more women want to climb the same pole as men, without fear. And it is dangerous, since the exercises of the thank you they are very complicated. Sometimes the athlete hangs upside down next to the pole held by one arm. Or he climbs on top of everything and balances himself with his belly against the pole, as if he were flying. Exercises similar to what so many people do today in a gym on a mattress, but three meters high. In addition, there are group exercises, where up to 10 people at a time compose drawings at the same time.
The word thank you it means “stick warriors”, and it has its roots in the training techniques of the soldiers of central India, especially the state of Madhya Pradesh, where it was declared an official sport years ago, and Uttar Pradesh. In the city of Prayagraj, ceramics from the 2nd century BC were found depicting exercises very similar to those of today’s sport, a practice documented in the area also in the travel notebooks of Xuanzang, a Chinese pilgrim. The thank you revived in the 19th century, when two wrestlers from Hyderabad are said to have visited the kingdom of Maharashtra and bet money that they would defeat all the strongest men in the region. An 18-year-old named Balambhattdada Deodhar agreed and locked himself away for a few days to train in a temple where he had a dream in which Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, appeared to him and taught him tricks on top of a stick And so he defeated the wrestlers who were passing by and gave a new impetus to this sport which in 1958 was included in the program of the national championships of the Gymnastics Federation of India. It brought debate, this idea, because for many practitioners the thank you it is not a sport, but an individual ritual to take care of body and soul. The thank you, however, it made its way and in 1981 a federation of its own was created, independent of that of gymnastics, with which it has spread throughout all the states of India and, finally, abroad. Now they become World Cups, in fact.
Modern rules have allowed juries to score displays, a system similar to that of gymnastics, with individual or team competitions. A good summary of what India is, land of legends and symbolism, where the past connects with a competitive present. Sports like thank you they serve to explain reality to us. They are part of local culture and identity.
