Sports

The Future Is Worse

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The Future Is Worse
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IN a reversal of the century-old motto of the Olympics, the Indian Olympic Association is now entitled—after Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta—to file a worldwide patent for the slogan 'slower, lower, weaker'. Clearly, our familiar four-yearly event of national breast-beating has not helped a wee bit. Nor will another 13-day mourning after Atlanta do any good unless we grasp the basic fact that national sports glory is just not possible without a widespread sports consciousness.

Our national Sports Consciousness Index can be seen from the statistic that, four years ago, three out of four Indians had neither the time, the inclination nor the facilities for sports. In stark contrast is the US where a survey, some 12 years ago, revealed that 96 per cent of all parents believe that sports competition is good for their children.

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For sports consciousness to be aroused and alchemised into Olympic medals, what is needed most is a massive input of money for creating and sustaining a network of sports infrastructure comprising first-class playing fields and the latest equipment. Money is required for producing and maintaining professional coaches with state-of-the-art expertise. Money is required to make sportsmen compete abroad adequately and appropriately. Money is needed, finally, to make sports an independent professional activity so that a good sportsman can attain a reasonable standard of living irrespective of whether he wins international laurels; the last alone will persuade an SSC boy or girl to take to sport as a career just as today's teenagers run after a computer diploma.

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And how much money is spent on Indian sport? When last revealed, four years ago in the Lok Sabha, the amount stood at 50 paise per person!

One result of this financial famine is the paucity of the latest facilities. Take hockey. For some years past, international hockey is being played only on expensive synthetic surfaces, which are exacting in terms of skill and stamina. When last heard, tiny Holland had some 300 synthetic surfaces, Germany over 200 and Great Britain over 150 while India recently acquired only its eighth (or was it seventh?) astro-turf. The result is that our juniors develop their skills on an antiquated surface and are compelled to cope with an altogether different surface far too late in their career.

Another shocking statistic: after India had hosted its second Asian Games in 1982, we had five fully equipped gymnasiums while China, which had not hosted a single Asiad till then, had 172 modern gymnasiums.

Another effect of the financial famine is the drought of coaches. In August 1984, there were reportedly some 500 coaches under the National Institute of Sports (NIS), Patiala. In the same month, Vijay Malhotra, a senior sports official, told UNI that "the need of the hour is to have at least one lakh more coaches." 

Some two years down the line, we had 72,809 coaches in different disciplines, according to the report of the Estimates Committee of the Department of Sports. Of this number, according to the committee, at least 50 per cent were working, not as coaches, but as administrators, while several others had to search for alternative employment to eke out a living.

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However, even 1,72,809 coaches will not do if they do not AP/PTI have a scientific temper attuned to sports medicine, computer science, physiology, psychology and nutrition. Sports champions became subjects of computer programmes some two decades ago in Colorado where they believe that the athlete is science in action. We have no such Dronacharya.

Then there is our archaic education system where the schoolchildren are prisoners of bookish knowledge with little time for the playing fields—assuming these exist.

The utterly vainglorious officials of our National Sports Federation blacken an already dark picture. Whenever their ambition goes beyond a free trip to the Olympics, the most they want to do is to organise the Olympics themselves. And the various sports arms of the state itself have been only limp. The kindest word that can be said about our officials is that, at a seminar in Delhi in July 1992, they confessed that they were the guilty ones in our sordid sports world.

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Finally, there is the reality of India's physical inadequacies. At the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, a team of anthropologists found that, in athletics especially, it was a herculean task for the Asians to compete on an even footing with the Caucasians and Blacks of Europe, Russia and America. No amount of training, they found, will produce an Asian athlete who can match the massive legs and strides of a Carl Lewis and the wingspan of a Michael Gross.

The message is clear: if we want sports golds at the world level, we need to put almost unlimited money in a limited number of sports disciplines, we need sports medicine experts as coaches and we need an environment where sports can became a vocation by itself.

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Meanwhile, we remain assured of a gold medal in one 'sport': population growth. We'll win that one hands—and pants—down.

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