bengaluru back in 2003 anju bobby george who won indias first medal in world athletics championships wondered when her name would be called out at the iaafs gala awards night almost two decades later the indian legend virtually walked down the red carpet at the world athletics awards 2021 to receive the woman of the year awardeven in those days it was a grand function iaaf world athletics gala and i used to dream of winning the award i couldnt win it as an athlete but im glad that i won the honour as a mentor the former long jumper told toi while taking a short break from her mentoring session with dozens of young kids in her communityat the anju bobby sports foundation we have 13 athletes in the highperformance category as we are working with sai support this will go up to 20 in the coming months once our facility is fully operational anju saidwith anju as mentor and robert bobby george as coach the foundation made its mark at the international level when shaili singh won the silver medal at the world athletics u20 championships in nairobi in august this award is in recognition of the overall contribution to athletics from mentoring to women empowerment to gender equality said anju who is the senior vicepresident of athletics federation of indiaa great inspirationanju said the prestigious honour would spur the foundation to work towards producing olympic medallists we will continue our work and this award from the world body will inspire us to work hard towards our ultimate aim olympic medalsall the coaching is done by bobby and my role is to mentor together we are aiming for a medal at the 2028 olympics and thats a realistic target there is only an outside chance at the 2024 games the 44yearold saidi used to tell the kids at the academy that we are starting from where we stopped i stopped with a world championships medal and shaili singh is starting from there we are glad that we are slowly reaching our destination anju addedanju won a bronze medal at the 2003 worlds in paris in 2005 she won the gold at the iaaf world athletics finals in monaco at the 2002 asian games in busan she won the gold her best show at the olympics was the fifthplace finish in athens 2004