Jiwanjot Singh Teja returned to coaching after driving trucks in North America for a year. On Wednesday morning in Nagoya City, he guided India’s women’s compound archery team to a gold medal. "I think we've done well so far," he said, marking a successful comeback to his professional sports career.
For nearly a year, Jiwanjot Singh Teja sat behind the wheel of a big-rig Volvo truck, driving cross-country routes across the USA and Canada. His past life was far behind in his rearview mirror. Sometimes he drove alone. Eleven hours at a stretch, drop the load, sleep in the truck and drive another 11 hours back. Sometimes he drove in a team, one man sleeping while the other drove, covering distances that seemed to have no end.
Ontario to Kansas City, 2000 kilometres, over three days. The hours were arduous, but Jiwanjot, then 36-years-old, was trying to start a new life. Every once in a while, he would get a reminder of his old one. "People would ask me, aap India ke coach hote the kya? And I'd reply. Ek time pe (at one point in time)," he recalls.
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On Wednesday morning, in Okazaki Chuo Sogo Park in Nagoya City, Jiwanjot was standing right where he belonged. Behind India's women's compound archery team, keeping them calm and spelling out keywords as they went on to win the first of three gold medals in the sport.
With a little under a third of India's total at these Games so far, Indian archery has been doing more than its share of the heavy lifting. Jiwanjot is in Nagoya as one of India's national archery coaches, working primarily with the compound squad. "I think we've done well so far. We could have done even better," he says.
The Games are a comeback of sorts for Jiwanjot too. He missed the last edition in Hangzhou three years ago. He had only just returned to India from Canada to restart a coaching career he had thought he had left behind.
Trouble began after the 2018 Games in Jakarta. India had competed in the three compound archery events there and won two silver medals, in the men's and women's teams. On his return, Jiwanjot made an application for the Dronacharya Award. It was the fourth straight year he had written, having first applied in 2014, when the compound archery team he coached had won one gold, a silver and two bronze at the Incheon Games.
On those occasions, he had been told he was too young to get a coaching award. But everything, it seemed, was in order in 2018. He was the most qualified candidate. The National Sports Awards committee also recommended his inclusion. "I started getting calls from the media congratulating me. My name was in the papers that I had been recommended by the selection committee. Then 10 days before I was to go to Delhi to receive the award, I found out that my name had been dropped from the list of award winners," he recalls.
Jiwanjot reckons he had rubbed some official the wrong way. The reason given was a charge of 'indiscipline' earlier in his career. That didn't make sense. "Why would they trust me with an Indian team if I was indisciplined," he says.
Furthermore, he had almost single-handedly dragged Indian compound archery into relevance. Originally expected to study engineering, he had fallen in love with the sport and decided to become a coach at a time when few in India even knew what compound archery was.
"When I did my NIS (National Institute of Sport) Diploma, our certificates were given to us by (triple Olympic hockey gold medallist) Balbir Singh senior. There were 56 of us in that class. He said all of us needed to produce at least one international athlete so that at least one of those could become an Olympic champion. That was my mission," he recalls.
He started working as a coach with the Indian compound team in 2009, just before the Commonwealth Games. In 2013, he took over the head coach's role. Indian compound archery might be big medal winners in Nagoya, but those were hard days back then. "We were nothing at the world level. We weren't in the top 15 at the world level. In Asia we weren't in the top five. When we went to international tournaments, we scored low in qualifying. That meant we were seeded against the top guys early on, lost, and then just roamed around for the rest of the competition," he recalls.
At that time, compound archers were seen as inferior to recurve since the latter was an Olympic event. "We had little equipment, sponsors, or even camps, but we were a team and had a passion," he recalls.
Jiwanjot would coach some of India's best archers, Abhishek Verma, who won the Asian Games individual title in 2014, and Jyothi Vennam, who has won four gold medals at the Games. He also coached Harvinder Singh, a para archer who would win gold at the 2024 Summer Paralympics in Paris.
He was proud of what he had created, but he had hoped for the national coaching award. "I had sacrificed my home life; I wasn't making too much money. Was it the worst thing to want some recognition?" he asks.
In 2018, when he was rejected, he snapped. "My athletes wrote in support of me to the Ministry. Maine bhi chakkar kate (I also made the rounds). But in the end I never received anything. I decided I was done with everything to do with archery in India," he says.
"I gave away all the equipment I had to junior archers, and I left," he says.
In Canada he didn't have any plans. He also couldn't get coaching jobs. "You need a Canadian coaching permit for that," he says. He still had to make money, though, so he did what he needed to do. He drove for Uber, worked as an Amazon delivery agent. "One time I had a cousin who made a video call to me while I was wearing my high-visibility bib. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He told me he was so sorry to see me like this, but I didn't feel it was anything bad. It's an honest living," he recalls.
Eventually he studied and got an AZ licence, a commercial licence which allowed him to drive tractor trailers and semi trucks, in Canada. Soon after, he started driving his own 75-foot-long rig. He didn't dislike what he did. "It had nothing to do with archery. I also love driving. I'd do my path (prayers) in the morning, play Punjabi music while I drove all day and then do path once again at night," he says.
Some days he had friends team up with him. "We'd go on long routes where we alternated between sleeping and driving. I think the longest trip I made was the 2000 kilometre one between Toronto and Kansas City in the USA. There is this sense of freedom on the road. I can't say I didn't enjoy the truck," he recalls.
He would probably have settled into the life. But one day, as he was driving into the USA, he got a call from a friend. "He asked me what I was doing in the USA, and I told him I was driving a truck. He said this was no job for a top coach," he says.
Jiwanjot didn't agree, but his friend persisted. "He asked me if I was the best trucker in the world. I wasn't; of course I had just started. He then asked me if I was amongst the top coaches in the world. I didn't know, but of course my students were World champions. My friend told me that everyone in this world has a purpose and my purpose wasn't to be a truck driver but an archery coach," he recalls.
The words stuck. "When I finished that trip, I put my semi truck's keys on my manager's table and quit," he says.
He eventually found work as a coach at an archery club in Toronto. They were thrilled to have a coach of his calibre. Although glad to be coaching again, he felt he had gone back in time. "I used to work with PhD-level archers. Now it was as if I was working with kindergarten students!" he says. But his work slowly got recognised. Eventually he started coaching the Canadian national team. One of his students, Yashveer Bains, has now qualified for the Youth Olympics this year.
He was with the squad at the 2022 Pan American Championships in Chile when he got a message that would reset his life once again. His name had been announced as a Dronacharya Award winner.
He had known it was coming. "Jyothi told me a few months before that she was submitting an application on my behalf. She wouldn't take no for an answer. She told me if that was what was keeping me from returning to India, she would do what she could to make sure I got it," he recalls.
Jiwanjot flew back to India directly from Chile and finally received his Dronacharya Award. "It was recognition, but I think the real recognition came from knowing the fact that my students had fought for me," he says.
The award was the catalyst for Jiwanjot to return to India for good. His family, though, still stays in Canada. His son Harkunwar Singh Teja is a member of the youth national team of that country. "Sometimes they ask me that after bringing them to a new country, I myself decided to go back to India," he recalls.
In India, he was once again quickly brought back into the national system. Although he didn't travel to the Hangzhou Games, Jiwanjot took charge of the compound team right after when the foreign coach Sergio Pagni quit.
Since then, Jiwanjot says he's been trying to incorporate ideas that he had once shelved. "Before the Olympics, I suggested we try to recreate the shooting conditions that our recurve archers might face in Paris right here in India. So we built the same shooting platform, the same wind flags and scoreboard. I had learned that this is how Korea trains their shooters, so this is what I wanted to do as well," he says.
The same practice was followed ahead of the Asian Games in Nagoya. "We simulated every situation we might face. We built once again the same platform, digital board and range flags. We trained in different conditions, so we were ready," he says.
On the day of the women's competition, Jiwanjot was on the platform himself, sounding out his archers.
"I was reminding them about the process. When Jyothi starts to draw her bow, I tell her, ' tight rakho, strong shot'. When Chikitha comes up, I say 'patience' because she has the habit of being too quick to squeeze her shot. Prithika is young and talented. I know she can hit whatever she needs. So I just say josh se," he says.
While India won women's, men's and mixed team Compound gold medals at Nagoya, they missed out on individual titles. Jiwanjot hopes the team will do better in the future, but he's grateful for what he has. " I'm happy that none of the team is returning without a medal," he says.
As for Jiwanjot himself, he's happy he's finally back where he belongs. His family, which stayed behind in Canada, including his son Harkunwar, who currently shoots for the national team, has mixed thoughts. "Because of the Asian Games, I haven't gone to meet them for a year and a half. Sometimes they want me to be with them and the other time they want me to do what makes me happy," he says.
Two days before the Games, Jiwanjot got a letter reminding him to complete his citizenship application. "I ignored it. I don't want it. The saplings I planted once are trees now. I want to see them flower. I want to see them in the Olympics winning a medal, " he says.