On the day of the CWG badminton finals, I ran into Ashwini Nachappa, former track star who was once called, even if sometimes bitchily, the Flo-Jo of India. At least in style and spirit and in her neon track suits, she was truly the Indian track’s answer to Florence Griffith-Joyner, even if her timings were mostly second best in the country her competition, by the way, was P.T. Usha. In the serious, boring, meek, and generally inarticulate world of Indian athletics, she was a welcome change.
Ashwini, who spoke fluent English, could also handle the media, mostly on her little finger. Early morning during the Beijing Asian Games of 1990 she would appear in front of the media hotel, to give members of the Indian press contingent a start for their morning jog. She usually waved and melted away after a few minutes, but the journos huffed on, their ranks swelling as the news of Ashwini’s inspirational presence spread. Ashwini was the Indian track’s first glamorous star, bagging some endorsements and a Kannada film or two.
Seeing her after exactly two decades since Beijing, I pulled her leg about how she taught journalists the running habit, even though the joke was really on us. But I also reminded her of a brilliant, and truly immortal, line she had then spoken. If Suresh Kalmadi, she said, could tell the distance between two hurdles, I will stop running. Kalmadi then headed the athletic federation, which he now controls from outside through Lalit Bhanot, lately famous for his theory of differential hygiene standards among India and the West.
Since that is not the kind of line you would forget, I had repeated it to Suresh Kalmadi just a few months back on NDTV’s Walk the Talk. So, Suresh, 20 years later, can you now tell Ashwini the distance between two hurdles? No, he said, totally unoffended. Can you tell me the approximate height of the high hurdles? No, he said, again entirely unruffled. He then explained with typical Kalmadi cool: I do not have to be an expert on every part of the game. I should know how to manage the game and its environment.
If you heard that today, your immediate response would be, so what else do you expect from a mere politician and so typical of the politico-bureaucratic-corporate class of power-people who smash and grab every sport in India. But is that really true? Whenever we do badly in sports, a clamour rises that officials and politicians are destroying our sports and how wonderful it would be if sportsmen were in-charge, instead.
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The best thing about sports is that performance is all about clear, established facts. Opinion, interpretation and prejudices come later. It is a straightforward case of rankings, scores, averages, records, and worldwide trends. And when you examine these coldly you find that the picture looks rather different.
All over the democratic world, sports are run by people other than sportsmen, and mostly by politicians and businessmen. Bureaucrats in sports federations is every much an Indian contribution, because India is a rare democratic country with a permanent civil service.
The most important, and happy, fact about Indian sport, or rather India’s non-cricket, Olympic sports, is the steady rise in our strength in several disciplines, particularly in contact sports. In boxing and wrestling now there are at least ten Indians who would feature among top ten in the world besides, of course, three ranked world number one. Along with boxing and wrestling, shooting, archery and weight-lifting are other disciplines in which we are today world-class, holding a couple of world records, and several Olympic medal prospects.
Besides these, we also have Olympic medal prospects in lawn tennis and badminton. Both games have produced world-class talent in every decade, but usually it was just one individual: one of the Krishnans, Vijay Amritraj, Prakash Padukone and Pullela Gopichand. But both now have a new depth of talent. Who has been running these sports in India, and rather well, it seems?
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It is a risky point to make in today’s mood of media mob violence directed at the entire sports establishment, when the two great villains of our entire society seem to be Suresh Kalmadi and Lalit Modi. But, as we said earlier, sports is all about facts. All the sports I have listed above have seen India come into Olympic medal contention for the first time. And who has been running them? Hold your breath, because I am now going to read out a formidable list of usual suspects. Boxing is run, you might say fittingly since most champions come from Haryana, by Abhay Singh Chautala. But his brother Ajay runs table tennis, another game in which we have been improving. Shooting, our main source of medals, was led by Digvijay Singh (of JD-U, Bihar) until he passed away last year. The wrestling federation has been headed for as long as you can remember by G.S. Mander, a retired IPS officer who held key postings in Delhi Police and the BSF. Assam’s MP Biren Baishya is the president of the weightlifting federation, and who else but Yashwant Sinha has run the All India Tennis Association for 10 years now. V.K. Verma, often caught sparring with popular players like Prakash in the past and Jwala Gutta now, is an Air India executive and has run his association for 12 years.
But the most interesting, and significant, is the case of archery. You can surely complain about the fact that Vijay Kumar Malhotra has pretty much owned that association for 37 years. But you should also be grateful to him for the fact that he has created interest, resources, identity and space for a sport that was not played, or watched, in India except during the Ram Lilas. Archery has also discovered such a wonderful breadth and depth of talent, a lot of it from some of our poorest, tribal areas. Remember Limba Ram, the first archer to become nationally known since Lord Ram and Arjun? And now Deepika Kumari, the daughter of an auto-rickshaw driver from Ranchi with the cutest dimples, the meanest eye and steadiest hand at the archery range, a double gold-medalist at 16.
The short point here is, it needs the enterprise, networking, ambition, entrepreneurship, and certainly the thick skin and greed of a politician, a businessman or even a bureaucrat in the Indian context (I.S. Bindra built the Mohali cricket stadium while still serving in the IAS) to build, manage and then monetise a sport in India. It is also a global phenomenon. Of course, you might mention Sebastian Coe who heads the London Olympics organising committee. But he also acquired the requisite skills as a two-term MP. So question corruption, wrongdoing, incompetence, arrogance and so much filth that you can find in our sports, as in any other establishment, for sure. But it is lazy and silly to think that just former sportsmen, and maybe the government, can run sports better. If you need further evidence, look how brilliantly M.S. Gill’s megalomaniac sports ministry is destroying Indian hockey, reducing our national game to our only nationalised game.
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