Deepa recalls how tough (read: impossible) it used to be to coax her son Varun Anand (15) off the football field when he was a child. Varun loved sports. No, he adored it. So, when he was nine, and began making excuses — “I am tired, I don’t feel like playing” — to weasel his way out of playtime, his parents suspected something was wrong. In the days that followed, they watched their son become a shadow of his former self.

The lethargy persisted. It grew into an exhaustion that impaired him from completing even functional daily tasks. “I just felt tired all the time; even if I ate well, even if I rested, I was tired. There came a time when I couldn’t even walk,” Varun recalls.

As Deepa shares, “It wasn’t just his playing that was affected; whatever it was — it impacted his life. He constantly ran a fever, and his legs would swell.” But they shrugged it off as something that would “get better” until one day Varun had to be rushed to emergency care.

Dr Saumil Gaur, a paediatric nephrologist at the Rainbow Children’s Hospital, Bengaluru, recalls his first impression of Varun six years ago. “Varun was very sick when I met him for the first time. He was very weak; his bones were weak, and they were bending. His blood pressure was high, and he was having seizures and was almost in a coma.”

As Dr Saumil and the team soon discovered, Varun was battling “a silent form of kidney failure”.

A battery of tests diagnosed him with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). The condition impairs the kidneys’ ability to filter blood effectively, leading to a buildup of waste and excess fluid in the body. In the weeks that followed, the then nine-year-old was put on haemodialysis and underwent a kidney transplant; his mother’s kidney proved a perfect match. Varun was nervous about how the transplant would change his life, uncertain about whether it would confine him to the stands when all he wanted was to be on the field playing.

But in 2023, at the World Transplant Games in Perth, his uncertainty about the future was substituted with three medals — gold in table tennis, badminton, and tennis in the 12-14-year age group. The transplant had given him a new lease on life. “I’d never known I had this potential,” he shares. Now, as the World Transplant Games 2025 kick off in Dresden, Germany (from 17 August to 24 August), Varun’s story shines a light on how, for those who’ve undergone transplants, sports often become the bridge helping them find their strength once more.

Where sports level the playing field

Right now, as you read this, athletes from 51 countries are gearing up to compete in 17 different sports in Dresden, Germany. At the........

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