“Angne found a warehouse or paint shop, which could be converted into a proper shed for the boats, though it needed work,” he recalls. With the boats procured, they next needed a proper place to house them. That place today is a parking lot,” he says. “She got three to four boats initially, which she placed near the PNSC building, as it was near the Chinna Creek, an ideal place for rowing. But Angne persuaded the German Consulate to donate the boats. The problem, Shahzad says, was that, around that time, Pakistan didn’t even have any rowing boats.

The German woman suggested to Shahzad that, given his physique, he try taking up rowing. He is also an internationally recognised rower himself, and it’s clear where his daughters’ passion for sport comes from Things were not going my way, not like I wanted them to at least, until I met this German lady, Ulrike Angne from the German Consulate, during another badminton camp in 1983.”Īt 60-plus, Muhammad Shahzad is more than the father of two of Pakistan’s most well-known female athletes. “I also remember being so disheartened after losing a match, at the Baldia Jr Badminton Championship in 1982, that I ran away from the juniors’ camp. “I remember working very hard at my game,” he says. Still, as I have mentioned already, I didn’t have the body for it, and was not really winner material,” he smiles. But I recovered fully after that, thanks to badminton. “They had to take out one-fourth of my pancreas to save my life. Shahzad had actually got into playing badminton after a serious accident and subsequent surgery when he was only 14. “I am now six feet, two and a half inches tall, but when I started at only 15, I was five feet 11 inches and I used to weigh 100kg, the most undesirable physique for a player of badminton,” says Shahzad sheepishly.

In his youth, he dreamed of becoming a top-class player in the sport one of his daughters now excels at: badminton. Shahzad didn’t start out as a rower though.

He himself has made an international name for himself in rowing his most recent achievement being a silver medal in the British Virtual Rowing Championship this past September. Muhammad Shahzad is father of Pakistan’s top female badminton champion, Olympian Mahoor Shahzad, and well-known international gold-medalist power-lifter Rabia Shahzad.īut Muhammad Shahzad, now in his sixties, is more than simply the father of two top athletes. But this man is the one behind two very successful young women. They say there is a woman behind every successful man.

Half life hidden achievement