Gold mettle

Sceptics will pounce on the "flaw" in the proposition. How can India be so confident of a cricket gold with Australia around? Cynics get that way because they are unreal pessimists. Australia would never be able to send its best side because of the time-money equation. Do you think Matthew Hayden and Shane Warne are going to play at the rates offered by a mere Olympics? It would be cheaper for them to stay at home and avoid injury, which is how David Beckham treats the five-ring show.

We on the other hand would send our best, partly because of the throbbing spirit of nationalism that always lurks above the surface of our players' psyche, and mostly because of generous goading from Subroto Roy Sahara. No contest. Except possibly from Pakistan. They do not have a Sahara out there, but the fact that they are even worse than us in the other disciplines might force their generals to order a pre-emptive strike through their cricket team.

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I also accuse the International Olympics Committee of being unfair and discriminatory to our athletes where dope-tests are concerned. Why is the IOC harassing poor Pratima Kumari and the even poorer Sanamacha Chanu? Neither knew that "drug" is a four-letter word. Pratima thought that she was being given an injection to improve some other performance by specially trained Bulgarian doctors. Everyone knows how much good testosterone can do to increase happiness, and a weightlifter needs all the mental peace available. Haven't you seen their faces as they pull up bars of metal that seem to have a special equation with the centre of gravity? Sanamacha, on the other hand, was being coldly rational, and the IOC has no right to penalise a sportsperson for a display of intellect. She had taken diuretics to lose weight. The logic is flawless. If lifting your own weight gets beyond you, how can you lift another 53 or 103 kilograms? That makes sense to me.

Moreover, Sanamacha had evidence sitting in front of her eyes. Sitting is the right term, since this particular bit of evidence could not stand. The great bronze hope of India, Karnam Malleshwari, star of the 63-kg category, could not get a first lift of 100 kg up to her knees. But a star will always remain a star. Malleshwari, borrowing deep from the innards of high Indian philosophy, treated failure with the scorn it deserves. She walked contemptu-

ously past her coach and did not bother to return for the two other attempts she was entitled to. Luckily, there were no senior officials present, since they never are, or she would have walked contemptuously past them as well. It transpired later that the great Malleshwari's husband, who has not stopped laughing since Sydney, could have informed these high officials that Malleshwari was finding it difficult to lift even a thought beyond the knee, but everyone forgot to ask him. They were too busy getting their tickets booked for Athens.

Our athletes may have an occasional problem with speed on the racetrack, but let it be known that they have the fastest minds in the business. You may not necessarily equate the shot put with intellect, but that is your problem. Shot put maestro Bahadur Singh clipped the world record for fastest reaction to failure. When the brave Bahadur realised that he had thrown a short

put rather than a shot put, he immediately disqualified himself so that his distance would not become part of the records. And so, while gossip will swirl endlessly through the mists of time, history will never know for sure whether Bahadur Singh's throw was less than the distance thrown by women in the parallel event. If there was a gold medal for quick thinking, Bahadur Singh would have been on the podium, with the national tricolour flying glorious and high behind him.

Maybe they should add such a category, along with cricket.

If the purpose of dope testing is to find who in the Olympic contingent is a dope, then it is my confident submission that the International Olympic Committee was searching among the wrong people, at least as far as the Indian contingent was concerned. If the IOC had any sense it would ignore the 76 Indian sportspersons spanning 14 disciplines at Athens and concentrate on the swirling crowd of celebrity officials, spanning all categories of indiscipline. That is where the IOC could find substance abuse of a pretty high order. (They would of course have to include Scotch in the list of banned substances, as well as fatty foods, but try asking anyone fond of either or both whether abuse is possible or not.) The real dopes are high on high office in the sports kingdom. They can offer 32 different versions of a trademark beam in front of television cameras.

The anger is not at failure, but at complete absence of pride: either pride in individual achievement, or pride in national success. Every four years, millions of Indians across the world feel a sense of humiliation as their national squad is relegated to an abysmal joke. I would prefer it if we did not win a single medal rather than find my country at the bottom, in serious competition with Mongolia, Slovenia, and Trinidad and Tobago. Every time we are offered hope; each time we are fed a lemon.

In 1980, China did not win a single medal, not gold, not silver, not bronze. Twenty years later, in Sydney, they had 59 medals. This year China heads the table at the moment of writing, and could be looking at perhaps 80 medals. Chinese sport is controlled by a bureaucracy. But it is a bureaucracy that cares about national pride. We have a floating mix of quasi-independent bodies and government busybodies, and therefore accountability also floats.

Is there an answer better than criticism?

Yes. In sports this mixed-economy model does not work. So, the first thing to do is to disband the sports ministry in the government of India and encourage sports to become what it should be, a valuable part of the entertainment industry. When you start by being valuable, you will soon become invaluable. The conversion of cricket from a dreary loser-sport in which players were lucky to get a

hundred rupees a day into a mega-business is an evident example. One star in the cricket team makes more than the whole of the hockey team together. Money breeds success and success breeds money. Which comes first? Investment. Who makes the investment? The person who wants to make money. Television is rich enough to fund the conversion of football with the cooperation of advertisers. Government's only role will be to offer tax breaks and incentives to those who make such investment in national pride. It will also be much cheaper than running a sports ministry.

Decision Number 2: Order all part-timers out of sports. If politicians want to head sports bodies then they must take a sabbatical from politics. Today, the controllers of sport take far more out of their position than they put into the game. The culture of sports-power is redolent of the 1950s when worthies were placed in charge of associations not because they knew anything, but because their "pull" was expected to pull in resources. Today sports is a fully professional business. The Chinese state succeeds because it works on the old Soviet model of child-to-star human management after a hardheaded cull of hopefuls. When sports becomes a means to reward that is more enduring than glory, then it will draw from an ever-increasing pool. Cricket has achieved that. Irfan Pathan and Virender Sehwag have emerged from ordinary and very Indian neighbourhoods to dominate a game redolent of Oxford and Cambridge. Once Eknath Solkar was an anachronism, Abid Ali the workhorse, and Tiger Pataudi the captain. Now, a Pataudi would be a rarity.

Decision Number 3: Dream big.

And try and push cricket into the Olympics. With hockey gone, we need to restart somewhere.

MJ Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.