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A big Bolt Chinese AFFAIR China’s Lu Lan, who won the women’s singles title in the championship Fit Zone
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A big Bolt The young Jamaican, who turned 23 five days after his lightning dash at Berlin, is not given to making idle boasts. He said he would show his competitors a clean pair of heels at last year’s Beijing Olympic Games, and he did precisely that, setting a new world record of 9.69 in the process. The world now sees little problem in believing him. In times when spectacular successes of athletes can raise doubts about performance enhancing drugs Bolt is one champion sprinter who is believed to be beyond suspicion. Shortly before the worlds at Berlin a few athletes from Jamaica had tested positive. But everyone was always sure Bolt was clean. Gifted athletes like Bolt need not cheat to win their gold medals and cash rewards. Thanks to WADA the world now knows that drug cheats will get caught sooner or later. Bolt’s historic Berlin victory was worth $1,00,000 in prize money. But in terms of sponsorship it was worth many times that amount. No wonder then that young people in Jamaica are taking to sports other than cricket, for which the Caribbean country had always been known. Asafa Powell, the man Bolt beat to win the Berlin race, is also from Jamaica. So also Shelly-Ann Fraser, 22, who won the women’ 100 metres in 10.73 seconds, though it was off the world record of the fabulous Florence Griffith Joyner of the USA. Times have changed since those days. Owens, who came from a poverty-stricken
background, faced a lot of discrimination in his time in his own country, which now has created history by electing a black man as President. Bolt, in comparison, is a rich man who could afford to give away $50,000 to China’s earthquake victims after he won three gold medals at the Beijing Olympics. The story goes that Bolt likes a McDonald’s meal before any big race. As for Owens, he once told a Delhi girl who questioned him on the ideal diet for an aspiring athlete: “If my mother cooked beans I ate beans. If she cooked meat I ate meat. On days she cooked both I ate both beans and meat.” Owens by then had become the perfect sports ambassador for the United States. So when will Bolt run the 100 metres in 9.4 secs? It could even be at the Commonwealth Games next October when the Delhi weather is ideal. Even if he doesn’t, he is sure to be the star attraction on the track at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. Despite his feats, Bolt does not consider himself to have achieved legendary status just yet. “It’s getting there,” he said, “but I don’t think two seasons can do it. I think I have to keep doing it year after year. It will take a lot of hard work because these guys are going to be coming after me next season and the season after that.” In the wake of his latest clock-beating run, he said: “Anything is possible, but I never go out there thinking about world records. For me, 9.5 is definitely a big thing. I’m proud of myself because I’m the first man to have done that.”
— The Independent
Standing 1.93 metres in his socks, he is five or six inches taller than most of his competitors. “If you have longer legs then you have longer muscles, which can generate more speed and more velocity,” exercise physiology expert Dr Richard Ferguson of England’s Loughborough University is quoted as saying to a British newspaper. But for all the technological and other scientific advances, there has to be a limit to the speed at which a human can sprint. Superman though he is called, Bolt is human, after all.
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The recently concluded Badminton World Championship was another proof of Chinese supremacy in the sport, writes
M. S. Unnikrishnan
When the Chinese get going, it’s impossible to rein in the marauding dragon. Barring the mixed doubles event, the Chinese ruled the court in the World Badminton Championship held in Hyderabad recently, to pronounce it loud and clear that they are the masters of the shuttle game. Not only players from mainland China, but Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, France etc. also left their stamp of authority to prove that players from the rest of the world have a lot of catching up to do. The Indian hope mainly revolved around the talented 19-year-old powerhouse Saina Nehwal. Though she was down with chicken pox just a week before the championship, the doughty girl fought the illness to give a commanding performance in the two games that she played to storm into the quarter-final to create history. She was the first-ever Indian player to enter the last-eight stage of a World Championship. The mixed doubles pair of V. Diju and Jwala Gutta, too, followed Saina’s footsteps to enter the quarter-final and create history, but there ended India’s medal hopes. Saina was expected to progress into the semi-final, but she found a stumbling block in second-seeded Chinese Lin Wang, whom she had humbled to win the Super Series crown in Indonesia a couple of months ago. Saina was beaten in straight sets 21-16,21-19 before a packed indoor stadium at Gachibowli. But the defeat was certainly not something to be ashamed of for the Indian lass. Wang foxed Saina at the net, and then pinned her back to get her points, from which the pox-tired Saina could not recover. The outing was a great learning experience for the Hisar-born, Hyderabad-domiciled Saina, who has the talent to hit the high ground in the coming years. Chetan Anand promised much in the men’s singles when he stormed past Hong Hoon of South Korea 21-18,21-16 in the opening round, and beat Stillian Makarski of Bulgaria next. But he ran into sixth seed Sony Dwi Kuncoro of Indonesia in the pre-quarter-final, and that was that. Sony was the only player to trouble men’s champion Lin Dan, and stretch him to three games, in the semis. Speed, power, jump smashes, strategy, a solid defence, his uncanny ability to vary his game to suit the occasion, were men’s singles champion Lin Dan’s forte. No wonder, Lin Dan took just 46 minutes to quell the challenge of World No 2, and compatriot Chen Jin in straight sets 21-18, 21-16. “All those who work hard win titles,” Lin said aptly after his historic victory. Like in the men’s singles, the women’s final was also an all-Chinese affair. Seventh-seeded Lu Lan stunned fifth seed and twice world champion Xie Xing-fang 23-21, 21-13 in 38 minutes as the young Lan engaged the 28-year-old Xie in long rallies to tire her out. Defending champion Lin Dan, also the Olympic champion, was the toast of the champioship, as he captured his third men’s singles title easily. Lin just rushed past the opposition to make the men’s singles event his personal feifdom. The men’s doubles and women’s doubles were also annexed by China. The only final without a Chinese presence was the mixed doubles, which was won by the seventh-seeded pair of Thomas Laybourn and Kamilia Rytter Juhl of Denmark for the country’s first badminton medal in six years. The total domination of China in the sport is because the country has a steady supply line of talent. They have such abundance of good players that China discards even some of their top players once they cross the 25-year-old barrier. And such players then turn up for other countries, and pay back China in its own coin. But this time, the Chinese presence was so overwhelming that players from other countries could only stand and stare as the Dragon devoured all opposition. |
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Fit Zone
The universe exists in perfect balance. It exists inside as well as outside the body. And whenever this balance is disrupted, disease breaks out. All the diseases of the world exist in nature. They might live in the air, or in the water or in a living being. But they are all around us. Certain bacteria live under the surface of your skin. Some live inside your stomach. Some actually help the body. And some help nature to decompose your body once it is dead.
So the first thing to understand is that there is no perfectly safe place, which is completely 100 per cent free of microbes, unless it is inside a laboratory. And man cannot live his whole life inside a lab. Death is certain for all of us, and as long as we’re alive we have to make efforts to be healthy, and also accept death gracefully when it comes. Some face it earlier, and some face it later. But death is the ultimate jump into the unknown, which has to be faced by everyone, today or tomorrow. If you don’t accept this simple fact, you will end up panicking in a fraction of a second. And panic has never helped anyone in life. Staying calm, cool and aware is the first step. If your body is weak, and your immune system is not strong enough to fight the microbes you need to take constructive steps to make your entire system strong. I don’t mean just your biceps or triceps, but your glandular, respiratory, digestive and circulatory systems, too, should be strong. Every single system in body has to be strengthened in order for the immune system to be made stronger. When your body is functioning optimally, your immune response is much faster and efficient. The immune response is your body’s reaction to an invading microbe. They say a smile improves your immune system. And though there may not be scientific proof for it, I can assure you the opposite — a depressed person will definitely have a weak immune system. Yoga can do miracles. But it is you who has to have the presence of mind to put it into action and see the results. Yoga is an experimental science, where you perform experiments on yourself. Never look to anyone for answers. Trust only in yourself. If surya namaskar, sarvangasana, ushtrasana and kapalbhati are practiced daily for 15-20 minutes, then your immune system will be improved immensely to fight diseases like the swine flu. |
The recently concluded Badminton World Championship was another proof of Chinese supremacy in the sport, writes
M. S. Unnikrishnan
If Usain Bolt, who brought the planet to a stop with a breathtaking 100-metre sprint of 9.58 seconds at the Berlin world track and field championships earlier this week, says he can run the distance in 9.4 seconds, well, he might then just go on and actually do it some day in the not too distant future. 
Though there is no place any longer for racialism in sport, not any longer, Bolt’s sensational world record victory at Berlin brought back memories of Jesse Owens’ gold medal win in the 1936 Olympics Games when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany was on the rise. Compared to Bolt’s 9.58 seconds, Jesse Owens could clock only 10.2, a timing that was only a fraction faster than that clocked by eighth placed American Darvis Patton (10.34) last Monday. Did the Feuhrer actually refuse to give Owens a congratulatory handshake? No one can be really sure. But closer to fact is that Hitler couldn’t believe a black man could run so fast. 
It was one giant leap for the sprinting kind to take the record from 9.69 sec to 9.58 sec — the biggest advancement in the 100m since the International Association of Athletics Federations opened an official world record book back in 1932. No man has ever made such an impact on the blue riband event of track and field.
So yoga not only works on all your systems, including your immune system, it also keeps you calm, relaxed and alert. A man who is happy, healthy, unafraid of death, and stays calm in the face of uncertainty, cannot be harmed by any virus or bacteria as his ability to fight the disease will be much greater than any of us.