India not ready for challenge

The Indian psyche is such that after every sports debacle there is nationwide breast-beating. Committees are set up and Parliament reverberates with questions. That public memory is short, is an age-old cliche. A couple of weeks pass and all the heat and dust settles down, observes Ravi Dhaliwal

THE heart of modern sport lies in a complex synthesis of strength and speed. And in modern sport, which demands a purity of power, India rests in the ice age. To state that ours is a country where a world class performance comes as regularly as the Halley’s comet is no exaggeration.

India’s performance in the Commonwealth Games was, putting it subtly, mildly euphoric. True, we were placed fourth in the pecking order at Kaula Lumpur, yet it should not be construed as a sporting revolution. It will altogether be a different ball game in the Bangkok Asian Games where the standards are much more frightening.

Bangkok will give us a chance to witness greatness not in isolation but in intense rivalry, striving for supremacy. In sport, greatness is more demanding than a string of good performances. A truely great athlete will produce his work again and again and he will be inspired, rather intimidated, by that greatest sporting disease — pressure. Sadly, the word greatness is not to be found in Indian sport.

The Indian psyche is such that after every sports debacle there is nationwide breast-beating. Committees are set up and Parliament reverberates with questions. That public memory is short, is an age-old cliche. A couple of weeks pass and all the heat and dust settles down. Everything is back to square one, till another debacle comes along.

With everything being geared up for Bangkok, indications, based on expert advice, are that India will fare marginally better than what it did in the 1994 Asiad at Hiroshima. At Hiroshima we had just a motley collection of just 23 medals. Bangkok will be a shade better. Nothing miraculous. In other words, yet another debacle awaits Indian sport.

Leave alone the world level, why is it that we cannot hold our own at the Asian level? Part of the problem is that men masquerading as messiahs of Indian sport prefer to put the interest of 980 million people on the backburner.

Take planning — so vital to excel in the international arena. That our sports administrators, barring a couple, have the collective wisdom of a sparrow, showed at Kuala Lumpur. The 93-member strong Indian contingent did not have even a single doctor. Contrast this with the South Africans or the Australians. The former had 15, while the latter had 22, including surgeons and orthopaedic specialists. With no back-up to attend to broken bones, Andrew Kokinos, the physiotherapist with the cricket team, was asked to stay back. Indeed logic is locked in a locker when contingents are decided. The IHF has already announced its squad for Bangkok again without a doctor.

If winning medals needs pain in the gym it also needs steel in the nerves. It is here where the role of our sports scientists and psychologists comes under scrutiny. The blame on them is that they are too busy authoring books, research papers and attending overseas seminars. For them to leave the lab for the sportsfield is considered to be sacrilege. Says a national champion, ‘they collect pensions’. But on the other end of the spectrum, for all their nuisance value, they cannot be faulted much. The equipment they work with has only archaic value. The NIS houses the only bio-mechanics lab in the country, but as a former Executive Director says." It is not of much use as we do not have the latest equipment. Contrast this with the state of the art technology the western world has. In Europe bio-mechanists film players and study them and fine tune their body movements. In Australia sprinters are filmed just to check the alignment of their hands in motion.

Another school of thought is that the Indian athlete is simply not responsive to whatever these sports scientists have to inculcate. This was specifically pointed out by athletic chief coach Vidyasagar, a man known for his thoroughness and technical acumen, who analysed the failure of our athletes in the 1994 Asiad. Wrote Vidyasagar in his report submitted to SAI after Hiroshima: "(Maturity and education among Indian athletes, especially men, is not up to the required levels. Here athletes take a short-cut to success".

Planning requires vision. Take Indian hockey, which was an ornament, till the astroturf ensured it gathered dust. To think of it, India has just 27 astroturfs. In comparison the Aussies have 1227, the Dutch 856, and both are powerhouses in world hockey. What happens here is that players are groomed on grass where the body is erect and the stick held vertically. Graduation to the turf means bodies crouched and stick held horizontal. But this adaption is not easy. Somewhere along the way the best talent disappears.

Talk about facilities. Here stadiums are built, inaugurated and mothballed. Yet all this talk facilities is rendered frivolous by the Kenyan long-distance runners - considered to be the best in the world. They have proved to the hilt that lack of facilities is not an impediment towards success. Only if the body is willing to endure pain. Runners in Kenya live on bunk beds, eat maize porridge. Yet they have the will to practise till their feet bleed and the body cries enough. This is what Indian athletes would loathe.

Money in a country where political fortunes depend on the price of onions is also an obstacle towards all-round development in sport. School sport, the base of all sport, is defunct. The School Games Federation of India (SGFI) organises a ‘Tamasha’ and calls it a national championship. Recently the SGFI sent a gymnastic team to Shanghai (China) which had senior NIS coaches in spilts. Unlike the university system in the USA which supports and breeds sportsmen, here the first priority of an athlete is employment. And once employed, skills are packed in a suitcase to be left home.

Western sport systems are engaged in a relentless search to acquire that macro-second which separates the good from the great (100m national record: 10.51s, world record: 9.84 s), that miniscule extra-surge of explosiveness (Indian spikers jump serve at 75-90 mph, Cuban spikers serve at 115-125 mph). Unfortunately that search has yet to begin in India.

At Kuala Lumpur, our pugilists found that their skills were blunted by technology, reason being that scoring in boxing is computerised and our boxers are yet to learn to handle the computer. In a close bout friendship obviously helps. After Hiroshima chief coach, G.S. Sandhu in his report had suggested the need for a Pro. But this suggestion has yet to materialise. At the preparatory camp at the NIS, Karnam Malleswari, a sure medal prospect in the 63-kg category for the forthcoming Asian Games, was suddenly asked to change her category to 58-kg. Chief coach P.S. Sandhu protested, Malleswari protested, and only then did things fall in place. Few in the Indian Weightlifting Federation seem to know that there exists a Grand Canyon like gap in changing categories. This shows that federations are wonderful studies in lethargy and the word foresight is not in their dictionary.

The rage for perfection is simply not there. Athletes are not hungry for success. Boxers leave camps midway (highly talented Birju Shah left the camp prior to the Commonwealth Games never to return) and lifters are asked to change weight categories mid-stream. Here hockey players after a three-hour strenuous session drink tap water instead of sports drinks which reintroduce vital supplements.

And to top it, if a nation does not recognise its heroes, it will have none. Olympians bend down to touch the feet of petty federation officials, fearful of disfavour. The bottom line is unless we accord to our sportsmen, sport in India cannot be viewed as a respectable career alternative.

Over to Bangkok.