Olympic medals? We don’t even want to win with the torch…

And there will be a bucket waiting for her so she can carry water back to her room.

The Olympics once stood for bravery and valour and the spirit of competition among athletes. The Olympic torch was a symbol of this proud movement; to carry it was to represent the Olympic ideals, to protect them and to respect them.

The amateur spirit has long gone out of the Games, financial realities meant sponsorship was vital and the Games need to respect the hand that gives them sustenance. But while sponsors must get their due, the Games must remain a celebration of sport, a triumph of courage and must acknowledge sportsmen that symbolise citius, altius and fortius.

The hands that bore the Olympic torch on Thursday belonged to people who were accomplished but whose faces sold dreams. The strength of their arms and the fleetness of their foot mattered little. This is not to belittle their achievements but they were in the wrong place; just as a weightlifter might be on Karan Johar’s sets or an athlete might in a staged romance. We got it wrong, dreadfully wrong. We blew our chance to celebrate sport.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Cathy Freeman ran the first leg with the Olympic torch; an aboriginal athlete who made a nation forget its cultural differences by running the most stirring 400-metre race at the Sydney Olympics.

That is what sport is meant to do, that is the message we could have passed to a generation increasingly weaned on chocolate romances and artificial WWE fights.

We blew it. We blew it big time. We took away one of the few moments sportsmen can call their own. We cheated them.

True, Anjali Bhagwat and Karnam Malleswari were there. But couldn’t we have checked if Norman Pritchard has a survivor? Doesn’t Khashba Jadhav? Wasn’t this the moment to applaud Milkha Singh and Gurbachan Singh Randhawa? Sriram Singh and PT Usha? And all those hockey Olympians who won medals for us?

Couldn’t we have announced to India when Ashok Kumar took the torch that this was the legacy of the great Dhyan Chand, the memory of that 1936 team that did more than just win an Olympic medal? And how many did we have there from the last Indian team to win gold? Shouldn’t we have relived the 1980 Olympics with Vasudevan Bhaskaran?

We don’t have a great sporting history and we don’t have too many world-beaters. And so we must celebrate what we have, remember those that went beyond the ordinary, whose hearts still beat with the intensity of competition and the desire to achieve. Unless we remind ourselves of their story, how can another Olympian emerge?

As with musicians, actors, artists, scientists and politicians, so too with sportspersons. One generation stands on the shoulders of the previous one, takes the baton from the past and hands it to the future. If we take away our past, we have no future, if we don’t celebrate sport today we won’t learn how to do it tomorrow.

What a pity that in our obsession with glamour we forgot some of our own sportsmen. So can we get Mallika Sherawat to recite Tagore? Ishaa Koppikar to remind us of our Param Vir Chakra awardees? Bipasha Basu to stand up for CV Raman? Shahid Kapoor to administer the oath of office to Manmohan Singh? Why not?

In the end of course it comes down to the question that real achievers understand. How badly do you want to do well? We didn’t want to with the Olympic torch. What a pity.