Sport is just a pastime here

A bronze for a billion people! That is what Indian sport is all about. K. P. MOHAN looks back on the dismal performance at the Sydney Olympics.

ONE BRONZE for a billion people! And still they say it was better than before and feel contented about it. That is what Indian sport is all about.

By the time Athens 2004 comes around, we would have forgotten about Sydney. Our experts would be drawing up comparative charts to fool you that India was better prepared than in the past. The end result will be the same. Our officials would give you the `I- told-you-so-look' if there was to be a bronze, then go and spend a week in Venice or Zurich.

What is wrong with Indian sport? Every four years we go through this exercise of what went wrong at the Olympics. There is an uproar as a nation, its pride hurt, starts comparing the number of medals or lack of them with the population of this vast country. That is no way to assess our sporting strength, for, not even one per cent of that population is engaged in serious sports activity. And sports gets less than 0.1 per cent of the Central budgetary allocation.

But should someone be held responsible when crores are spent and the end result is a bronze? Yes, someone should indeed be, but our sports officials are pastmasters in skulduggery. You bet, no one will own up responsibility this time too.

Seventy-one Indian competitors were there in Sydney. Some of them like the hockey players were there in Australia a month before the Games began. Some others, like most of the relay team members, ran just one race to become Olympians. A few precious seconds at a heavy cost for precious little eventually.

Medals were expected from hockey, weightlifting, tennis and boxing. With some luck, shooting, too. In the end, there was just the bronze from Karnam Malleswari in the 69 kg category of women's weightlifting.

``Our performance was better than before,'' said the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) Secretary-General, Mr. Randhir Singh, when The Hindu sought his views. ``In the next Olympics, we will be in a better position to go for more medals,'' he added.

Mr. Randhir Singh's assessment was based on Malleswari's bronze plus the performance of the shooters, Anjali Vedpathak and Abhinav Bindra, and the boxers. Hockey was being touted as another hard-luck story. No one was willing to talk about the athletes and the rest.

For the record, India participated in 13 disciplines, athletics, badminton, boxing, equestrian, hockey, judo, rowing, shooting, swimming, table tennis, tennis, weightlifting and wrestling. The country had one bronze through Malleswari, one sixth place (Sanamacha Chanu in women's weightlifting), one seventh place (hockey), one eighth place (Anjali Vedpathak in women's air rifle), one 11th place (Abhinav Bindra in men's air rifle), a semifinalist (400m runner K. M. Beenamol) and a quarterfinalist (boxer Gurcharan Singh in the light heavyweight category).

The others were either good for one or two rounds, as in the case of national badminton champion Pullela Gopi Chand, or finished last, as in the case of three-day eventer in equestrian, Imtiaz Anees, or the rowers, Kasam Khan and Inderpal Singh. Anees was quoted by an Australian daily as expressing his satisfaction over his `achievement'. He was indeed thrilled that he had made it to the Olympics. That happened because someone else had withdrawn.

Should we enter competitors just because they qualify or attain a minimum entry standard or because someone else fails to fill a spot?

``That is the way it was in Atlanta and that is the way it was here. There was a qualification system and everyone was keen to participate since the IOC (International Olympic Committee) was footing the bill for qualified competitors,'' said Mr. Randhir Singh, an Olympian himself. He still could not explain why there should be vacancies at all, if every country was keen on participating and cashing in on the IOC bonanza.

India never had a qualified competitor in men's swimming, but still we send someone, just because the international federation (FINA) allowed a male and a female swimmer, irrespective of the qualification standard. Our man, S. H. Hakimuddin, finished 50th out of 51 swimmers in the men's 200m freestyle heats. The woman, Nisha Millet, the first Indian swimmer to have qualified for an Olympics, fared slightly better, 37th out of 39 girls. Both were well below their best.

Of course, there is always the next time, as the man in that automobile ad tells his son about the poor marks in maths. But the next time, we will still talk about lack of exposure, lack of opportunities, poor facilities and poorer diet. Then talk a little more about broad-basing sport, prioritising disciplines and scientific support. The best and cheapest - whichever way you look at it - scientific support could not get India a place in an athletics final; forget a medal.

Hockey proved the biggest disappointment. It always is for India. Two decades have passed since the V. Baskaran-led team gained a devalued gold in Moscow. This time, Baskaran was the coach of a team that had been put through the grind and which in the assessment of many a critic was a medal prospect. Even the gold was not being discounted among the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) circles before an unnecessarily large squad of 22 left our shores.

Quite illogically hopes were raised when the Indian team beat Argentina, which actually could not even qualify and had come in as replacement for South Africa. Our team, prepared by sinking crores of taxpayer's money, drew with Australia next. This was the barometer that suggested a semifinal spot. The defeat against South Korea brought us down to earth, the win against Spain kept us in the hunt and then the anti- climax. India had to hold out for about 90 seconds against Poland for a draw and a semifinal berth. The team could not.

Now, everyone is talking about those precious seconds against Poland and the `so near and yet so far' tear-jerker. No one is asking, why India could not defeat Poland in a crunch match, and that too by a comfortable margin. If we start talking about Poland, one of the lower ranked teams in world hockey, in the same breath as Holland, the eventual hockey gold medal winner, then Indian hockey will never climb back from the rut it had been in. The damage had been done when the IHF boss, Mr. K. P. S. Gill, dismantled a gold-winning combination after the Bangkok Asian Games in 1998. To build all over again was a difficult task.

Hockey apart, the other big disappointment was a pair of world- beaters, who were getting together all over again after a brief estrangement. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi were both coming back from injuries and thus a big question mark always remained about their ability to fight back in a competition like the Olympics. To add to the Indian miseries, our pair ran into the Woodies, Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde, in front of their adoring home fans in the second round and lost quite tamely.

If ever there was a hard luck story among the Indian contingent, that was boxer Gurcharan Singh's. The light heavyweight had to either throw a good punch or evade a punch in the last 10 seconds of his third-round bout. He could not do either. His bout with Ukrainian Andrei Fedtchouk was tied 12-12 and the latter gained a decision on a countback. Gurcharan wept in the dressing room.

The rest was routine. Or was it? ``In our assessment, Sanamacha Chanu (weightlifter) was fourth, and that is where she finished,'' said Maj. O. P. Bhatia (retd), Executive Director (TEAMS Wing, SAI), the man in charge of the preparation of the Indian Olympic contingent. Malleswari, according to the SAI assessment, had a bronze medal chance. She won that. If you keep listening to Maj. Bhatia, you will come back with the feeling that, after all, there was nothing wrong with the Indian performance.

That the eventual men's badminton champion was Ji Xinpeng, the Chinese whom Gopi Chand had beaten in the Malaysian Open, should give us some idea about how the others produce their best when the biggest challenge faces them. Ji Xinpeng had scalped top seed Taufik Hidayat and third seed Peter Gade Christensen in back-to- back upsets on way to the gold. He knew how to raise the tempo a notch or two on the biggest stage in the world of sport.

Our athletes did just the opposite. Barring K. M. Beenamol, the other athletes in a 29-strong squad, India's biggest ever, failed to come anywhere near the standards they had achieved at home. They were truly the also-rans. ``Beenamol did well, the rest of the lot did not perform at all,'' said Maj. Bhatia. ``They had hit their peak during the Asian championships in Jakarta,'' he pointed out.

Nothing can be more misleading than this assessment. No Indian hit his or her peak at Jakarta. In fact the sudden slump in standards in the Asian meet, though the performances fetched six gold medals for the country, was a cause for concern. But no one could care. The Amateur Athletic Federation of India (AAFI) which swore by its selection guidelines that were much stiffer than the entry standards laid down by the international federation, finally went by the popular slogan among federations. ``The more the athletes the more number of officials you can pack in a contingent''.

There will be many theories about how shot putter Shakti Singh had slumped from his best of 20.60m to 18.40m, of how javelin thrower Jagdish Bishnoi had thrown nearly nine metres less than what he had done in India, of how woman discus thrower Neelam Jaswant Singh was nearly eight metres down on her national mark. Don't believe any. The truth lies elsewhere. And one of the things which the Sports Ministry can look into straightaway is the charge initially made by P. T. Usha about drugs playing a major part in Indian athletics.

``There is doping. There is some sort of hanky-panky going on. Otherwise how can you explain so many Olympic qualifications and such a poor performance,'' asks Mr. Vijay Kumar Malhotra, President of the Archery Association of India, and a senior Vice- President of the IOA.

``Sports is business, it is no longer a passion,'' says Mr. Gurbachan Singh Randhawa, one of the few Indians who made an athletics final in the Olympic Games. ``They were only interested in the prize money.''

A gold in the Asian meet will get an Indian sportsman Rs. 1.5 lakhs, while an eighth place in the Olympics will get him nothing. The rush for medals in Asian meets is thus understandable especially when the standards are low, as it happened at the Jakarta ATF meet.

Here, an Olympic qualification is the prime target. Then, being an Olympian is the ultimate achievement. Forget the medal or even a place in the final. Had Baron Pierre de Coubertin been alive, he would have agreed that only Indian athletes appreciated his philosophy.

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