For three days, an Indian girl in a quiet corner of the Tokyo suburbs had been raising the roof. As she gritted through the fourth day, sports fans in India - and NRIs and PIOs across the world - tuned in to watch at 5 a.m., refreshing leaderboard scores, looking up birdies and bogeys, and, for five hours, wondering what bunker they'd been living in.
Aditi Ashok, 23 years old and ranked 200 in the world, fought a stacked field before missing a birdie and slipping out of medal contention in the final couple of holes. India at the Olympics and torturous fourth-place finishes are a recurrent, scarred theme.