On a scorching day of fainting veterans and rifle-shot starts, a girl named Kainat Khalil from Sindh rewrote the meaning of endurance at the 35th National Games.
Athletics at the Games began not with a traditional pistol’s pop, but with the sharp, unexpected report of a rifle cutting through the cool Monday morning at the NPT&SC.
It was an omen. This would be a day of raw, unvarnished struggle, where the starting command itself felt like a call to battle.
The dust from the inaugural men’s 5,000m had barely settled before the December sun perched mercilessly over the open field. It transformed the arena into a kiln, making the very air an opponent.
In the women’s 10,000 metres, the drama was medical: Athletes wilted, fainted and were stretchered away — vanquished not by rivals, but by the searing haze.
Wapda’s Maria Bibi, who would emerge the quickest in 44 minutes and 21 seconds ahead of Navy’s Mumtaz (47:10.11), later stated the obvious with exhausted clarity.
“The heat felt extreme during the race and that’s why the athletes fainted,” Maria told Dawn. It was a race of survival, where the medal was, as Maria put it, “a cherry on the top” of simply finishing.
Amidst this brutal theatre of attrition, a sight unfolded that turned struggle into spectacle, and pain into pure wonder: Nine-year-old Kainat from Sindh running with a rhythm that seemed borrowed from a breeze.
While finishing was a task for veterans, she moved as if she had been training for precisely nine years.
On the final lap, she found a sprint that would have contended in a much shorter race, crossed the line third, and laid down on the track. The stadium’s cheer wasn’t just for a medal; it was a roar of sheer, unadulterated fascination.
After the medal ceremony, the media scrum proved more daunting than 25 laps.
“What do I say? I don’t get it,” the bronze medalist sighed, shrugging, turning her palms upward in helplessness. Coaxed by her coach, she found her voice, slow and sure the second time.
“My name is Kainat Khalil and I compete in long distance running. This is my first time competing at nationals,” the shy nine-year old told Dawn.
Then, the truth she made her own. “This was not possible but I made it possible,” she parroted what her coach had gently said to her just seconds before.
What goes through a child’s mind during such an ordeal? “Just that I need to run. However much there is to run, I will.”
Asked if she enjoyed this masochistic craft, the doll-sized athlete nodded a vigorous “yes!” Her advice to her peers was timeless. “Work really, really hard to get what you want.”
Before the sweat had dried, her eyes were already set on the Karachi marathon and then an international stage, where she dreams of gold for Pakistan.
