Never Sat on Train Floor: Hockey Player Namita Rubbishes Reports

Reports surfaced that players were forced to sit on the floor of a train on their journey back home.

Deep Grace Ekka, Namita Toppo, Lilima Minz and Sunita Lakra greeted by local authorities at the railway station. 

While National Sports Day was being celebrated across the country on Monday, four hockey stars from India’s Rio Olympics’ campaign saw their names in news headlines.

They had not bagged any new medals, there were no laurels being reported, instead “completely false and baseless” quotes were being attributed to them.

“Indian Hockey Stars Made To Sit On Floor of Train,” read headlines. But as Namita Toppo clarified with The Quint, “we never for a moment sat on the train floor”.

Having returned from Rio just a few days ago, Deep Grace Ekka, Namita Toppo, Lilima Minz and Sunita Lakra, hailing from Odisha, were given air tickets to Ranchi for their return home. Since Rourkela doesn’t have an airport, and all players are Railway employees, they got onto a train for the two hour journey to their hometown.

With no tickets in hand, they went through the normal procedure of looking for the TT and enquired about vacant seats, “since as Railway employees we have a quota of seats we can avail of,” said Toppo.

While the TT went to check the train for empty seats for us, we were waiting and that’s when they started saying we sat on the floor. I want to clarify that none of us were made to sit on the floor of the train. In fact, when the TT returned, he even allotted us seats for the journey.

Namita Toppo, Member, Indian Hockey Team

Namita Toppo in action for India. (Photo: Hockey India)

After de-boarding the Dhanbad-Alleppey Express on Saturday, the players even received a warm welcome from the state authorities. However, its not the celebrations they remember, instead the news headlines that Toppo says, left them “feeling bad about our entire trip”