Olympic legend saw her father in Aamir Khan’s Dangal character

Chen Shih-hsin, Taiwan’s first Olympic gold medalist, has revealed that Aamir Khan’s 2016 film Dangal was a significant inspiration for her own journey to success.

Superstar Aamir Khan’s 2016 drama Dangal has inspired many people, who found the determination to succeed through the Nitesh Tiwari directorial.

One such person who resonated deeply with the blockbuster is Chen Shih-hsin, the first Taiwanese athlete to win a gold medal at the Olympics.

In an interview with NDTV, Chen mentioned Dangal as the film which had “uncanny resemblance” with her life. In the movie, which till date remains the highest grossing Indian film in China, Amir played the strict patriarch Mahavir Singh Phogat, who trains his daughters Geeta Phogat and Babita Kumari to become world-class female wrestlers.

“When I watched Dangal with Chinese subtitles a few years ago, I noticed an uncanny resemblance between the wrestlers’ father and my own. My father was a hard taskmaster, much like the father portrayed in the film. I feel he was even tougher on me,” Chen Shih-hsin said.

The Olympic legend, whose father ran a Taekwondo training centre and introduced her to martial arts at the age of five, said she used to “despise” his “relentless push” and, as a result, ran away from home, only to reunite with him years later and begin the journey of an Olympic gold medal, just like the one in Dangal.

“Yes, you could call me a chip off the old block when it comes to inheriting my father’s grit and toughness, similar to the characters in Dangal,” she added.

Chen Shih-hsin created history when she bagged the gold medal in the women’s 49-kilogram category in taekwondo at the 2004 Summer Olympics.  She now teaches around 100 children at her Taekwondo school in the rural township of Xinfeng, near Taiwan’s semiconductor hub, Hsinchu, the report read.