A tale of boxing bravado

The state-run Indian Boxing Centre at Bhiwani deserves kudos as four of the five Indian boxers to have qualified for the Beijing Olympics hail from this club, writes M.S. Unnikrishnan

Boxing in India, nay Haryana, has received a very big boost as four out of the five boxers who have qualified for the Beijing Olympic Games hail from a single club in the State. -- Vijender (75kg), Dinesh Kumar (81kg), Jitender (51kg) and Akhil Kumar (54kg) -- are products of the Sports Authority of India Boxing Centre at Bhiwani, coached by Jagdish, while Adresh Lalit Lakra (57kg) is the lone outsider, from Jharkhand. Doha Asian Games bronze medallist Vijender, Dinesh and Jitender made the Olympic cut in the Asian qualifying championship in Kazakhstan recently while Lakhra and Akhil Kumar had qualified earlier.

The “boxing boom” in Haryana has been set off due to systematic planning and execution to promote the sport in the State with a combination of helpful factors like irresistible financial incentives, with the sound support of sponsors and the mush-rooming of boxing clubs all over State, aiding the cause of the sport greatly.

The opening of boxing clubs in the interiors of the State, particularly in Bhiwani, Hissar, Kurukshetra and Panipat, has enabled the unemployed youth to channelise their energy into a profitable pursuit as the talented boxers not only stand to make attractive financial gains, but also have a bright future to look forward to.

The round-the-year coaching camps, financed by the Union ministry of youth affairs and sports, is also a great attraction for the promising boxers, who mostly come from poor families, as they get free meals and decent accommodation.

The International Olympic Committee also gives scholarship of $300 per month for a few talented boxers identified as Olympic prospects, and the Indian Amateur Boxing Federation (IABF) would have forfeited this amount had no Indian boxer qualified for the Olympics.

For the boxing revolution in Haryana, due credit must also be given to Abhay Singh Chautala, as it was after he took over as the president of the IABF that a concerted effort was made to spot and train talent in the State began. But ironically, Bhiwani falls outside the realpolitik ambit of Chautala, though this has not come in the way of his giving full backing to boxing in the district.

And Indian boxers now get the kind of facilities their predecessors could never even dream of. “Round the year coaching camps, good food, AC rooms, good funding and sponsorships from the Mittal Champions Trust and Shiv Naresh, foreign coaches, foreign exposure, cash incentives... the boxers never had it so good”, noted Dronacharya coach and a senior selector of the IABF, Om Prakash Bharadwaj. Akhil Kumar, accompanied by physical trainer Heath Mathews, has been sent to South Africa to treat his injured right fist by well-known orthopaedic surgeon Dr Ferguson, who had treated Sachin Tendulkar, which shows that there is no shortage of funds to take care of the needs of promising boxers. (Heath Mathews was also the trainer of Sania Mirza for a brief while).

Bharadwaj said if the Bhiwani Club could produce four Olympic qualifiers, it was largely due to the financial backing provided by the Mittal Trust for the training, coaching, boarding and medical facilities of the boxers. He said the trust had even hired a bungalow in Bhiwani to house the champion boxers and their coaches in comfort so that they could totally focus on their chosen sport, leaving the nitty-gritty of managing their every day existence to the trust.

Bharadwaj should know his boxing as when he was the national coach, from 1966 to 1989, India had won three gold, 12 silver and 12 bronze medals, in six Asian Games, from Bangkok (1966) to Seoul (1986). But after his exit as the national coach in protest against the appointment of foreign coaches, India could win only one gold and seven bronze medals in five Asian Games, from Beijing (1990) to Doha (2006), with the country drawing a blank in the Beijing and 2002 Busan Asiads.

Eighteen of Bharadwaj’s trainees have won the Arjuna award and four others have received the Dronacharya Award, which is an unmatched record.

Haryana did not have much of a boxing tradition till Hawa Singh emerged on the scene to lift the national heavy weight title at Ambala (1961), Calcutta (1963), Jabalpur (1964), and Chakradpur (1965). Another boxer who did the State proud was Mehtab Singh, who won the national boxing championship light heavy weight title five times, starting at Ambala in 1971. He also won the Asian Championship gold twice, at Tehran (1970) and Bangkok (1973).

Boxing clubs dotting the Haryana landscape are carrying out what the Army had done for the promotion of boxing in the 60s and 70s. Boxing in India would be a different ball game, if other States also followed the success formula of Haryana.

What a Finnish
Peter Rutherford

Kimi Raikkonen cruised to victory in Malaysia to put Ferrari back on the track and slash Lewis Hamilton’s lead to three points. World champion Raikkonen failed to finish last weekend’s season-opener in Australia but the Finn sealed his 16th grand prix victory when he took the lead from team-mate Felipe Massa at the first set of pitstops.

Indian business tycoon Vijay Mallya’s Force India Team fared better than they did in Australia as Giancarlo Fisichella finished 12th after starting 17th on the grid. Although Adrian Sutil’s second consecutive race ended prematurely, this time due to a technical snag.

BMW Sauber’s Robert Kubica finished second, the best result of the Pole’s Formula One career so far. McLaren’s Heikki Kovalainen was third with British team-mate Hamilton having to settle for fifth. Massa’s race came to an end on lap 31 when the Brazilian, who started on pole position with Raikkonen alongside, spun out at turn eight and could not escape the gravel trap.

“It was a pretty easy race from that first pitstop really,” said Raikkonen. “We had quite a difficult weekend in Australia and we were not 100 percent sure it was going to be any different here. “But everything worked perfectly. This is a good start to the season for us and we're in a pretty good position,” added the Finn, who scored a point in Australia after only seven cars were left running at the finish.

Hamilton, who started ninth on the grid after he and Kovalainen collected five-place penalties for impeding rivals in qualifying, finished behind Italian Jarno Trulli, who took a fine fourth place for Toyota. Nick Heidfeld (BMW), Mark Webber (Red Bull) and Spain’s double world champion Fernando Alonso (Renault) collected the rest of the points.

Kubica savoured BMW’s second runners-up spot in a row following Heidfeld’s superb finish at Albert Park last week, but said his team had to rein-in their expectations. “It was a fantastic result for the team,” said the Pole. Kovalainen, on the podium for only the second time in a career spanning just 19 Grands Prix, said McLaren had a lot to be proud of after being hit by the penalties on Saturday. The Finn qualified third fastest but started from eighth because of the five-place drop. “After yesterday’s penalty it was going to be a hard day for us. We have to be pleased with the results,” he said. After two races Hamilton leads the championship with 14 points, ahead of Raikkonen and Heidfeld with 11. The next race is in Bahrain on April 6. — Reuters

We are competitive: Mallya Chairman and managing director of the Force India Formula One team, Vijay Mallya, described the performance of his team in the Malaysian Grand Prix as one in which “We showed that we are not what people thought about us as the team bringing up the rear, but one which is able to race and be competitive”. Though Adrian Sutil was not able to complete his second consecutive race, Giancarlo Fisichella finished at a creditable 12 position after starting 17 on the grid. Mallya said, “We showed that the car has real race pace and we beat both the Williams drivers who were on the podium in Australia. Looking at the average lap pace of the car then we can see we are just a second behind the Ferrari and that is creditable,” he added. — UNI

Hockey Debacle
Ground realities
Ravi Kant Singh

India have failed to qualify for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games’ men’s hockey competition. Suddenly the entire hockey world seems to be concerned — and not without reason. After all, the very survival of hockey as an Olympic sport is at stake — it finished among the bottom four disciplines during the International Olympic Committee’s 2004 congress in Singapore where London won the right to host the 2012 Games.

It is no secret that there is little interest in hockey in the world, other than in India and Pakistan. It is a moot point that the only requests for Live television and radio coverage right from the preliminary stage matches were received only from these two countries. Australia and the Netherlands too evinced interest but only for the semi-finals and final.

Now with India failing to make the grade, whatever little commercial interest there was left in the sport seems to have vanished. And the international hockey federation, FIH, seems to be well aware of its predicament. Why else would they be so keen to launch the ‘Promoting Indian Hockey’ project with former Australian captain and coach Ric Charlesworth at the helm.

While the whole world is busy painting the top brass of the Indian Hockey Federation, especially its president Kanwar Pal Singh Gill and secretary K. Jothikumaran as the chief villains, it may be fit to recall the “key” role the FIH itself played in sparing no effort to push Asian hockey off the lofty perch that it had occupied since 1928.

It all started on the fateful day in 1975 when the FIH agreed to allow the Montreal Olympic Games organisers to host the field hockey competition on synthetic rather than natural grass. The logic was that given Canada’s severe winters it was well nigh impossible to prepare a grass pitch fit for the event. Little did the FIH realise that its making synthetic surface mandatory for all international events it was forcing the young hockey players of India and Pakistan to re-learn the game from scratch in their late teens.

Economics dictated that India get its first synthetic hockey pitch only in 1982 for the Asian Games in New Delhi. Even now, for a young Indian hockey player, the earliest brush with synthetic turf comes only around the age of 15-16 if his/her school manages to qualify for one of the premier age group tournaments played in Delhi.

And then, bang comes the realisation that playing with standard shoes can leave painful blisters on the feet. Trapping with a vertical stick is obsolete and one must bend the back to get the ‘dead stop’ with a stick laid horizontal on the ground, something that is fraught with danger on the natural grass that they have hitherto played on.

But it’s about time that FIH got its own house in order if it wants to remain in the Olympic fold. After all, no marketing man will vote against a sport watched by more than a billion people but, in this ruthless world where profit is the buzzword, without the numbers field hockey has become too expensive to sustain.