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Journalism of Courage
8226; I am 17 years old. I live in Goa and I am in the sport of yachting. I had participated in the 2002 Asian Games in Busan in the under-15 sailing event. After doing badly, I came home and began training for the 2006 Asian Games in Doha. Let me tell you that you cannot blame athletes for their poor performance in Athens. They come from middle- and lower-class families and apart from training, also have to concentrate on supporting their families. The Sports Authority of India needs to pick up athletes from a young age and start training them. With proper facilities, sponsorship and support, our athletes too can give better performances. My goal is to win a gold in the 2006 Asian Games in yachting and in my campaign leading up to the Games, I need to participate in many international events, and it all depends on government funding.
Salil Sabir
8226; If we want to win medals, we have to prepare as the countries who get medals prepare themselves. I have a small suggestion in this regard, as requested by you in your column. There are business houses who institute various prizes. Any one of them should be persuaded to take up, for example, the event of long jump. Long jump is okay because it is not expensive. And anybody can practise it anywhere. The business house should institute cash rewards at school level, college level, state level and country level. There should be five prizes at every level because it is necessary that many are rewarded so that competition develops. Those who get first 10 places at state level could be accommodated in schools as physical instructors.
Ajay B Agrawal
a In India, people start late. Most Olympians started in their sport when they were four. How many four-year old-Indians specially in the lower economic strata have their parents send them to sports camps?
b Lack of training, facilities and knowledge. How many swimming pools do we have in Bombay? How many track and field stadia?
c No money in sports apart from say, cricket and tennis. So this can8217;t be your 8216;8216;real job8217;8217;.
Shankari
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8216;Answer is out there if India8217;s prepared to listen8217;
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8226; I8217;ve covered women8217;s basketball in Australia for about eight years, and was at Sydney in 2000, and I8217;ve seen which nations have improved since then and which haven8217;t. I think Indian sports officials need to realise that the answers are already out there, if they8217;re prepared to listen. Look at Australia8212;a population of 20 million, similar to that of Assam, and we8217;re consistently among the top five in the Olympics medal tally. Sure, we spend a lot of money, but also we8217;ve been developing sports for so long that it8217;s become a science, and we8217;re very good at it. India should copy us, and copy any other nation that has a successful model to offer in any sport. We copied everyone else! We8217;ve got diving coaches from China, running coaches from Africa, scientific equipment from America, etc, etc. If we saw some other nation was succeeding, we8217;d send people to learn what they were doing, hire one of their coaches if possible, and copy their methods. Every major global power today does this, and not just in sports8212;also in economics, technology, military etc. It8217;s only the Swadeshi brigade that insists that India must continually reinvent the wheel. Story continues below this ad |
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8226; Your analysis made interesting reading. However, I differ with you on several points:
a 8216;8216;Forget medals tally8217;8217;: If we do that, we will go back 20 years or more. For, this is what we have said all these years8212;that medals are not important, performances are. Medals have to be the target, at least in the Olympics. And for that we don8217;t require 100 sportsmen in the top 10 or top 20 of the world. Ethiopia doesn8217;t have that many, Thailand doesn8217;t have, Indonesia doesn8217;t have, to give just a few examples. But they will surely have say four top badminton players, 10 top athletes, eight top boxers, one top judoka, two top weightlifters and so on.
b 8216;8216;8230;it does not matter if he/she improved India8217;s rankings by 10 places8217;8217;: The argument sounds rather hollow. No one improves the country8217;s rankings, they improve their own rankings unless say it is a team game. And no one can improve by 10 places by winning a medal in Olympics or any other competition. If you say medals are not important then there is hardly any scope for improvement in rankings by say cutting 0.2 seconds off your personal best in 400 metres and clocking a national record.
c 8216;8216;Our system must learn to reward better performances at all levels8217;8217;: With a rider. Performances in competitions where there is no serious dope control should not be given any importance at all. Also find out whether medal-winning, placings performances are comparable to national-level performances. Simply by saying encourage performances at all levels, you might encourage mediocrity too. Like, for example, a gold in the Commonwealth weightlifting championships.
d 8216;8216;Privatise, privatise, privatise8217;8217;: It is no use blaming cricket. Look at your own coverage. You cover foreign football, apart from cricket. And that8217;s about all. Do you bother about Indian athletics, Indian football, Indian hockey, Indian badminton? Unless of course there is a scandal. You look for the 8216;8216;no water, no toilet8217;8217; stories8230;
e 8216;8216;Anju as brand ambassador8217;8217;: Forget TV, athletes don8217;t get time in even your paper. Unless you have no Italian football, no German league, no Dutch football, no special write-ups on Beckham and so on. Why blame TV?
d 8216;8216;Carl Lewis and Gail Devers8217;8217;: Your comparison of Carl Lewis with Anju is equivalent to someone comparing Tiger Woods with Ernie Els in terms of sponsorship money! A majority of the American, Canadian, Kenyan, Ethiopian athletes must be making less than Anju George.
e 8216;8216;Sportspersons don8217;t get more than one crack at rewards every four years8217;8217;: Every two years we have Asian Games, every two years we have Asian championships in some disciplines every year, every four years we have Commonwealth Games, every two to four years we have World Championships, every year we have Commonwealth shooting and weightlifting championships. And sportspersons don8217;t make money out of Olympics, for we normally don8217;t win anything bar the odd bronze. There is no dearth of competitions to earn incentive awards. Anju bagged quite a lot when she won that medal in Paris.
f 8216;8216;Call out the Army8217;8217;: If Army discipline can make champions, Services should be dominating the national scene. They are slipping every year and there is not even one discipline barring archery may be where they can claim superiority. Don8217;t look at Rathore8217;s example alone. Anyway, the Army has had its 8216;8216;go for Olympics8217;8217; or some such slogans for a programme in which it sank crores. Barring a couple of archers, they haven8217;t produced anyone under that programme.
g 8216;8216;Disband IOA8217;8217;: This is not a dictatorship. IOA is there because of the autonomous structure of international sports. IOA doesn8217;t have any role to play in sports development or sports promotion in the country barring a few thousand dollars doled out to federations and individual sportsmen under IOC schemes. It has no role to lay in training, no role in selection of players or athletes, no role in disciplinary matters within a federation, no role in sending teams abroad for training/exposure etc.
P Kumaran
8226; To continue on your theme and expand on it, I request The Indian Express to check the performance of all Indian competitors at the Olympics. I believe there a few who have performed better than ever and might have created new national records. Though they have not got the medals, they deserve appreciation, awards and rewards from India and let us do that first. Regarding not getting medals in sports like table tennis, lawn tennis, hockey etc, there are variables which are not precisely controlled. Even Roger Federer and Andy Roddick, who are No 1 and No 2 in tennis in the world, lost their matches.
R Nagarajan
8226; You have given five suggestions in your column. I would like to comment on 8216;Privatise, privatise, privatise8217;: Well there is no doubt that deregulation or leaving to 8216;8216;market forces8217;8217; should be the best strategy. But if you see the numerous federations/associations at national level and coming down to state and district level, these are quite independent. With so much of independence the 8216;8216;in-charges8217;8217; tend to monopolise. Elections are rigged because of the money involved and the same people occupy posts for years. While privatisation is desirable, there should be a common set of rules in formation of the executive committees.
I also differ with the suggestion 8216;Call out the Army8217;. The contribution of the Army in Indian sports has declined in the past. Yet taking a cue from this suggestion, I will extend the logic: nominate large institutions like the Army, ONGC, IOC, India Railways to take into their fold one or more games.
A K Jain
8226; I stay close to a Sports Authority of India complex in Kandivli, Mumbai. It is a sleepy place hardly ever buzzing with sporting activities. The table-tennis area is a dark dingy room with three tables and in the summers, it turns into a virtual oven. There is gymnasium equipment lying in the open, with barbed wire around and covered by tarpaulin. The karate room leaks and the cricket coaching ground is overrun with weeds. The lawn tennis court is a cleared ground marked with white lines. The running arena is in slightly better shape. There are signboards that say squash courts and billiards room but I have never seen them. About the coaches the less said the better. They charge extra on the sly and are only concerned about filling their pockets. If this is the state of a premier coaching facility, I shudder to think what it must be in rural areas. I can afford to give my kids good sports training, so can a lot of other parents, but where are the coaches and where is the professionalism and the facilities?
Sharmila Menon
8226; I was watching a boxing event in the Olympics between two black boxers. I thought they represented some African countries but was surprised to find that they were from Sweden and the UK. One stark fact of sports today, which was very apparent from the Olympics, was that it has globalised. A girl from Georgia won the trampoline for Germany. Mia Audina, shunned by her native Indonesia, represented the Netherlands and won the silver in badminton. A weightlifter from Bulgaria not only changed his name but also his religion and was representing Qatar in weightlifting. Merlene Ottey, who won a bronze in Moscow in 1984, was representing Slovenia at the age of 44. The list is endless. What was surprising was that most of these athletes were being lustily cheered by their new countrymen. There was no false 8216;swadeshi8217; pride here. In India, even if we bring in a foreign coach, we think that it is an insult to our athletes.
Admiral J G Nadkarni retd
8226; Maybe you should write a strong editorial or article in your paper about how big business houses could come forward and spend money for developing sportspersons. Firms like Indian Oil, Hindustan Levers, ITC etc could easily take care of some of these expenses, or even the BCCI. What is the big idea of accumulating wealth in the form of fixed deposits like BCCI does? And this before it awards the contract for the next five years for TV rights in India!
C N Shankar
8226; Though there are several bureaucratic problems regarding sports in our country, it all boils down to one factor: the athletes8217; attitude to win. If say the athletes were given all the facilities, would he/she win a gold medal? Sadly, no. Does India spend less on sports than nations like Ethiopia, Eritrea and Kenya? No, they do it because they are committed to what they do and their next meal depends upon their winning a medal. That is why they win gold repeatedly in their line of speciality. All our athletes have an assured job in a PSU and all they need to do till they retire is to sign an attendance register and walk away for 8216;8216;practice8217;8217;.
Rajesh
