Vajrasar Goswami
I am a die hard cricket fan, Period.
Whenever Sachin Tendulkar hits that straight drive or Zaheer Khan clean bolds opponent, my heart skips a beat while I cheer for Team India. That’s a usual story for 80 percent of our cricket fanatic country, including me.
However, when ace shooter and bronze medalists Gagan Narang, Mary Kom (Boxer), Saina Nehwal (Badminton), Yogeshwar Dutt (Wrestling) and Silver medalists Sushil Kumar (Wrestling) and Vijay Kumar (Shooting) won those medals for India at the just concluded London Olympics 2012, I felt good, because all these players, despite of their hideous sporting career full of struggle, be it financial, social as well as political, they cracked the medals and dedicated those to the nation that is already swallowed by Cricket.
They practiced having the fact in mind that no one even knew who they were (well a few who watch news and take interest in sport now know who they are). They walked down the stadium holding the National flag, when they knew that the majority of us would be watching the India-Sri Lanka series, and asking for updates of Olympics on Twitter.
You would easily see thousands of sport-experts criticizing the performance of Indian athletes this Olympics, who would say that they are too disappointed, feeling down, ashamed and even laughing. But these are the same genre who didn’t even know who Mary Kom or Sushil Kumar was before they bagged the coveted medals.
Spare the names of sports; we don’t even know how many sports we were competing for in this Olympic. But on the other hand we keep following even the personal lives of cricket players.
The Government on the other side announced cash and goodies for winners – so kind of them. The same government won’t realize that giving Rs.1 crore to an individual would be nice, but the nicer thing would be to provide additional facilities and training packages to budding players who are preparing for such International events – so that we don’t have to come empty handed next time.
The Indian Football team is yet waiting to qualify for the World Cup while the Hockey Team came home watching their foot-nails, and we don’t even know who else lost, other than who all won. India sent a total of 83 athletes to compete in 13 sports at London Olympics ’12. Do you even know what sports they were! (Don’t Google them now!).
I have no intention to hurt the soft-spongy-mushy Cricket corner of the heart, but I think Sports in India need more respect attention and concern apart from the glorious Cricket saga.
After all, cricketers too have made their way from nick, worked hard to prove to get that attention of us – that’s fair. But what seems to be unfair is that we are blind to other sports.
We want them to win Gold, but how is it possible without providing any facility to mold them to be able to fetch that Gold.
And, for the sake of humanity at least stop criticizing athletes for their performance, as for if you can’t cheer for them, you have no right to criticize them.
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>hideous sporting career
I don’t think you really mean to use hideous there. Most of our Olympians have had exceptional sport careers. And plenty of them(Bindra, Gagan Narang, Ronjan Sondhi, Saina Nehwal, Rajyawardhan Singh Rathore) come from affluent families who were able to support them financially whenever needed so it was never the case they had to suffer financially although of course they would have pleased if sport associations would have taken that initiative. I rather think that only a few of the sportsmen who actually suffered financially made it to the Olympics.
Let us confess we do have a piss poor Olympic team. People generalize it heavily when they think of the probability of having one gold medal winner from a country of a billion individuals, neglecting the years of training the stoic athletes went through. It is clear that demise of cricket in the country won’t popularise Olympic sports.
I might as well ask why wasn’t anyone watching Joydeep Karmakar in the final event of 50m rifle instead of watching Saina play Quarterfinals at Wembley? This guy, nobody heard of, ended up at 4th position and a point away from bronze medal. No governments announced prizes for him, no news channel thought he might as well deserve some space.
Also, I wouldn’t expect majority of Americans to be able to name all the Olympic sports or even know about all the gold medallists. I guess we can safely assume that how much an average citizen knows about Olympics is not related at all to the number of Olympic medals won by the nation.
Thanks for reading the article, Shailendra. As of what you said, I still stand tall on the fact that around 80% of the sportsperson (except cricket) remains unnoticed, and is it a good thing that only those players who come by a financially fit family make into olympics?
Not to state the obvious, the training itself costs in huge amount. In fact, leave every other sport – I don’t know about them, you don’t know about them. What about Hockey? Its our national sport, then why can’t government prioritize over any other sport. Why can’t our hockey team be on high stakes like Cricket.
It is worth mentioning, if I have choice between Cricket and Hockey. I would choose Cricket – because in my mind – “who will even know me if am a hockey player!”.
And I don’t see or believe that we have a piss poor Olympic team, its the management, training and funding sides which are poor.
tsk tsk… Hockey isn’t our National Sport http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-08-02/top-stories/33000002_1_national-game-hockey-team-indian-hockey-federation
Why Cricket has to creep in at every discussing about India at Olympics? You might as well blame regular day jobs for potential athletes choosing them over the game they were good at in School or University.
Kids in my colony play cricket because it is fun and cheap. They love football too, by the way. Comparing both of them with Hockey — your favourite sport — the latter is less safe, more expensive and therefore less popular. The number of players further dwindles when they’re faced with the let-down of having to play on artificial turf instead of the ground they always had been playing it on.
Now obviously, like any other why-india-sucks-at-olympics discussion, it too has to end with us whining about how we don’t have proper infrastructure to train our athletes. I however wonder if we really are in a state to spend a greater fraction of our GDP on sports when there’s a part of India that sleeps hungry everyday in the dark.
I will be glad to leave you with a question of assignment of priority to the concerns, be it of our place in medal tally or the actual issues causing greater misery to a larger part of the nation namely poverty, poor health services, low literacy rates, water and electricity scarcity, imbalanced sex ratios, rampant corruption, crime rates, inflation, and a whole lot more of them.
Upon them — for we are ‘aware’ citizens — we also have to worry about Tiger Population, Global Warming, cartoons in 10th standard textbooks, earthquake somewhere on the other side of the globe, iOS or Android, protesting for IIT-Udaipur, best starter pokemon, demise of Hindi as a language, batman vs. spiderman, brain drain, and the fact that my actual comment ended in the last paragraph for this is not even related.