By Trisha Ghosal
I’ve seen freedom. Not the kind written into laws, but the kind you can feel, in the trembling hands of a high jumper before they leap, in the silent breath a chess player holds before making their move, in the water spray from a para-swimmer’s last, desperate stroke.
As a woman in sports journalism, I didn’t just walk into this world; I had to carve my way in. And the chisel I used was curiosity, not just about who won or lost, but about what it took to get there. I wanted to know what drove a sprinter to train before sunrise, why a weightlifter closed her eyes before every lift, how a wheelchair tennis player mapped the court differently in his mind.
Covering sport, in all its forms, has been my education in courage. It taught me that resilience isn’t a grand speech, it’s the quiet, relentless repetition of effort. It’s the hockey player training on cracked concrete because there’s no turf nearby. It’s the para-athlete inventing a new technique because the existing ones don’t work for their body. It’s the mountaineer who takes one more step even when the summit feels like a myth.
Sport is barrier-breaking by nature. Athletes do it every day, smashing records, challenging perceptions, rewriting what’s possible. And telling those stories is its own silent movement. Because somewhere, someone will read about a woman footballer leading her team, or a para-athlete redefining ability, and their own mindset will shift, just a little. That shift, that private, unseen change, is the purest form of freedom I know.
The independence I’ve found in sport is not just in my profession, but in my mind. It’s in having the agency to follow a story wherever it leads, to speak truth without softening the edges, to honour the grit without romanticising the pain. Sport has made me free to question, to challenge, to step into spaces where I was told I didn’t belong and to stay there.
And here’s the thing: you don’t have to love sport to understand what it gives. Because the core of every game, every race, every match, is something we all recognise, the will to try again, even when the odds are stacked against you.
On the eve of Independence Day, I realise my freedom isn’t a finish line I crossed once. It’s a thousand small choices, to keep telling the stories, to keep listening to the silences between the cheers, to keep believing that truth, like sport, should belong to everyone.
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