Sports: Asian Games; Glint of Gold

Some individuals sparkle as other Indians fail in a similar tale of officials buffoonery, inflated egos and misplaced priorities.

Down there in Debogram village in West Bengal's Nadia district, where papa was a retired pole-vaulter, running through the fields not physiology was what she graduated in. Growing up in Sekta village in Manipur, he was bloodying himself in the ring before he was 10, so who the hell thought of biology classes. It hardly matters. For, Jyotirmoyee Sikdar, India's new golden girl who shook like a leaf in a summer wind on the morning of her 1500 m race, and Dingko Singh, the gold medal winning boxer, have discovered one vital fact. That though they are both 5ft 3 in and short in reputation, in their small bodies beats a lion's heart.

It's simple. Luck, training, commitment, talent and whichever Lord they pray to, all that is essential. But at the moment of competition, when you can feel the breath of your rival on your neck, and when the crowd bays hate, the athlete needs something more. Heart? Call it what you will, most of

India's bloated 240-member contingent to the 13th Asian Games didn't have it. And only in the telling of their stories do Dingko's and Sikdar's find a complete perspective.

Bangkok, where the word illicit must have been first invented, is no stranger to the bizarre. Indeed, the coach of their soccer team instructed his players to repeatedly listen to We are the champions, the old hit song by the rock band Queen. But God, what might they have thought of the Indians. Where the women's football team conceded 36 goals in three matches (wait, they scored one too); where by the time the swimming team finished the 4x200 m relay the Chinese team had towelled and gone home; and where officials whose closest proximity to sport has been through a television screen strutted with blazers that said INDIA. "They've cheapened it," said former weightlifter Balbir Singh Bhatia and he was being polite.

Dingko landed a slap on the face of officialdom

Before it gets better, let's make it worse. Here are two stories about fame. When Thai boxer Somluck Kamsing won an Olympic gold, he was given houses, cars, millions of bahts and only missed out being King because there already is one. Here's Geet Sethi's story. First Indian officials didn't honour him by asking him to carry the flag -- Dhanraj Pillai who did is a fine hockey player but world champion like Sethi he's not. Maybe they just didn't know who Sethi was. After all, when the world billiards champion asked for his team's official kit -- at the Asian Games all teams wore identical tracksuits, India's was still arriving -- one official asked "yeh kaun hai" while another said "ek T-shirt le lo as a souvenir". Sethi quite correctly hit the stadium roof: "We have no national identity, we're not a team. This personifies our indifference and inefficiency." So did the officials squirm? Nah, heart they don't have. Said one senior Indian Olympic Association official days later, "I think Geet's taking it too far."

The men's hockey team is back in world reckoning

It was an Indian sporting spirit so worn out by official buffoonery that even winning teams wore doleful looks. Men's hockey coach M.K. Kaushik told India Today perfunctorily, "My contract is up after this games but I'll quit anyway. Our preparation is only 50 per cent and I don't want to work with the Indian Hockey Federation any more." For a man who had been appointed coach only in August this year and who was within sniffing distance of winning gold when we spoke to say this was a tragic reminder of where Indian sport had gone.

She didn't just smile, she giggled, a laugh as breathless as her day had been. Sitting in the bowels of the athletics stadium Sikdar shook Indian hand after Indian hand, endured Indian embrace after Indian embrace. Then the 1500 m champion giggled again, "Twice I've dropped my gold medal." Had the nerves of the morning never left?

It began early on the day of her 1500 m race when her husband Avatar, a former 800 m runner, called from Calcutta. "Don't worry," he said, "take God's name and run." Still she would not calm. "I met her in the Games village," said former sprinter Adille Sumariwalla, "and she was shaking. I told her 'you know you have trained, no one can take that away from you'." Still she shook. This wasn't her event, the 800 m was. "I thought I'd get a bronze, maybe even a silver, that was it."

Bhupathi won three bronzes, but the team medal eluded him

And then it happened 120 m or so from the finish, as she closed down on the straight, the tabeez that coach Hargobind brought her from a temple in Jhansi rattling against her neck. For weeks she'd been training with Bahadur Prasad who won bronze in the men's 1500 m; for weeks Hargobind had been teaching her what he calls "fox running" which is about breaking away from another runner with cunning and speed. But eventually it is up to the athletes, how much their nostrils twitch with the smell of victory, if they're ready to die. She was. "I don't know what happened but I told myself then, give your life, die, but go for it." And she went. Her 4:12.82 sec was her personal best.

Clearly no one was ready to anoint her Usha's heir, not even the organisers who played the Qatari anthem instead of the Indian one after her 1500 m win. Days later in the 800 m she left people no option. Like a wisp of a girl in a hurry to get home before dark, her tiny feet danced down the track as she left Rosakutty a distant second and whistled past her previous best of 2:01.47 sec to time 2:01.00 sec. There were whispers, nothing more, of the absent Chinese girls who beat her to bronze in Fukuoka. Did it devalue her medal? Did the petite railway superintendent give a holy damn? At 29, she is the first athlete to win a gold since Usha won a double gold in 1986. It is a long way from the village sports day at Debogram.

Winning Touch

India won the discus bronze

When the teams were being selected for September's Commonwealth Games, All India Amateur Athletic Federation Secretary Lalit Bhanot was asked how many athletes he wanted to send. "Zero," he replied to astonished faces. "I just felt my athletes couldn't peak twice in such a short time."
Then, people sniggered. Now, even Asian athletics officials, he says, "are telling me it was a great decision". After all, in just one magical afternoon, his athletes had won seven medals including a gold from a girl whose name wasn't Usha.
If the athletes helped save face for India at this Asian Games, they also injected some honour back into a dying sport. After the heroism of Charles Borromeo and the gifted 1982 Asiad squad, for too many years athletics meant Usha. She ran, we won. More than that India seemed unable to produce a range of athletes. This year that has altered, with medal winning performances in everything from the 100 m sprint to the 10000 m to the discus. Every final India entered it won something.
The athletes have prostrated themselves before Bhanot in gratitude and their worship was within reason. Firstly he brought in a series of foreign coaches, Alexei lvanov for throws, Valeriy Moshkovsky for sprints, Georgi Tchernychev for long distance, injury specialist Yuri Boiko and masseur Tatiana Gritsachuk.
Secondly, he increased the food allowance. Thirdly, in a country where most federations have only about three domestic meets, he organised eight top-class competitions. As Krassilchitkov explains, "You need competitions to keep checking if your training is working."
Krassilchitkov himself played a significant role, for he designed the training programme, so detailed that he could tell week to week how many throws a shot putter would do in July, how many kilometers a runner would cover in September, all calculated for the athlete to peak at a particular moment.
Such was the level of confidence that athletes who usually have an excuse for every failure were now unhappy with the colour of their medals. Said 1500 m bronze medallist Sunita Rani, "If my personal coach had come with me I may have won gold, definitely silver." Rachita Mistry was flying high too. Yes, the 100 m bronze was nice, but "I really wanted to break Usha's record".
For Usha there was only rebuke, as if stepping on a fallen angel had become a favourite pastime. In the 400 m her age was clear with every stride, so too her injury, her 54.72 sec a lifetime slower than the 51.61 sec that she did in 1985. In the 200 m she didn't even qualify for the final. "The prima donna should retire," said Adille Sumariwalla brutally. Maybe she heard him, for she has.
It is tragic that India's most celebrated athlete had to make such a forgettable exit

One day at the athletes' village as she strode down the boulevard, she was asked, "Why do you run?" She giggled, what else. "I like people to recognise me, to have my photograph in the papers."

Dingko's almost never did. Which is why when the first beer can came spiralling down from the stands and hit him on the shoulder after his semi-final win, he couldn't give a damn. He was just glad to be here.

It didn't matter that World No.3 Sontaya Wongpratis of Thailand had stepped through the ropes and brought his nation into the ring with him. It didn't matter that drumbeats echoed, spit flew and voices threatened. This may have been boxing hell but no one had told the Thais that Dingko, as coach G.S. Sandhu said later, "had a point to prove".

Three weeks ago at the training camp in Patiala they told him. He wasn't going to Bangkok. That someone (not one of the coaches) had decided the gold medal winner at the King's Cup in Bangkok last year wasn't good enough anymore. The boy, only 20, was stunned. "He tore his shirt. He screamed," said a member of the boxing team. "He threatened to commit suicide. He shouted 'I've worked so hard all year for this?'"

Dingko actually had been struggling but there was a reason. From last year's 51 kg class he'd shifted to the heavier 54 kg this year, a transition that's always awkward. Explains Sandhu: "In the heavier weight the reach of the other boxers is more. Dingko has to learn to come in and box." Yet dropping a proven winner in a nation which has few is absurd policy, and after boxing federation President A. Mattoo argued Dingko's case, he was cleared three hours before the team left Delhi.

God had stepped in and Dingko knew it. "It was my kismet to come here and to box like this," he says. So what if he burned with 100.4 fever that day, so what if he began to tire halfway through the fight, his mind refused to betray him. To register a point scored in boxing, three of the four judges have to press their buttons within a second of witnessing a punch. "This is where Dingko did well," explains Sandhu, "he hit a lot of clean punches or what we call punches visible to the judges. He also guarded himself so well that the Thai was constantly hitting him on his arms which doesn't count." When the referee raised his hand, a part of Thailand erupted in fury. Dingko smiled. He had come too far to lose.

Maybe he knew then that Wongpratis was his test, that the final against Uzbekistan's Timur Tulyakov, though fifth at the Atlanta Olympics, would demand less of him. But it would not come served on a plate either. He danced, he watched, he came in and jabbed. Sandhu said he had to learn to fight inside and he had. Tulyakov took off his gloves, his headguard and crying failed to come out for the fifth round. Beaten by an Indian with a lion's heart.

Three men, Padamlal Bahadur, Kaur Singh and Hawa Singh (twice), had won Asian Games boxing golds. As Dingko's name was added on, officials lined up to take credit for getting him on the team. Later as he spoke about his father, who had died years ago, and his village which believed in him, one memory kept lingering. Of a young boxer, just 5 ft 3 in acknowledging the applause, then falling to his knees in the middle of the ring to speak to his Lord. Maybe he was saying he was ready to ascend to boxing heaven.

"Gone, gone, gone," moaned shooting coach Sunny Thomas, peering through his binoculars. In centrefire pistol Jaspal Rana could hit the bull'seye after 11 whiskies; hitting a series of 7s was as unlikely as the Second Coming. Rana never knew it but heartbreak had been nestling closeby.

World champion Byung-Taek Park had shot 589/600, a world class score, and so had he; then Park had shot 149/150 in the tie-breaker, putting bullets through a keyhole, and so had he. One man had to break. No, make that one gun. In the middle of the next tie-breaker, Rana's gun-sight comes loose and he shoots 9,9,9,7,7 to score 41/50. Park hits 49/50. Four years of waking early in the morning, driving through Delhi's pollution, putting on ear muffs, shooting bullet after bullet ... four years in the dustbin. Of course, Rana wept. He didn't come here for silver.

In tennis another shoulder bent under the expectation. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi promised gold after gold but with Paes out injured Bhupathi was asked to play Hercules. Hey fellow, we know you've been on the tour for 40 weeks non-stop, but please win us the team championship. And the singles and the doubles and the mixed doubles. "It was his call," said coach Jaideep Mukherjea. So what, did he think the kid would say no?

Drinking five litres of water in one morning, playing seven matches in three days at one point, having to carry his inexperienced team at every turn, he still came home with three bronzes. His reward? On the day he and Nirupama Vaidyanathan lost the mixed doubles semi-final, and you could see tiredness embrace him, All India Tennis Association President R.K. Khanna was heard remarking loudly, "Tsk, tsk, they missed four sitters."

Officials lounged, shopped, ate, commented. Not much more it seems. Said a golf official, "On the first day we were told there would be a meeting of officials every night to review that day's performance and what was to be done next day. When we arrived for the meeting next night no one was there." So maybe they didn't talk, did they take notes at least? That the Thais award their gold medallists a million baht, the Taiwanese 85,000 dollars, the Indians Rs 1 lakh. That the Thais had three doctors/physiotherapists just for their weightlifting team, India had eight for the entire contingent. That the Chinese, said weightlifter K. Malleswari, had 30-40 lifters vying for one place in her weight category, while in India she has no competition.

Hockey ace Ajitpal Singh said the same thing: "I had six to seven players jostling me for a place but even now there is no one to replace Dhanraj Pillai." It makes us a land of old and unchallenged heroes like Usha. It is not a good tiding. Says training methodology expert Alexander Krassilchitkov, "If they don't have to fight in domestic competition for their places, they won't learn to fight in international competition." It also makes for soaring egos. When Baichung Bhutia was substituted against Nepal, he actually sat on the bench and started coaching till coach Nayeemudin reminded him it was his job. Bhutia should have visited the golf course: there the Korean women's golf team had a male coach and when he was unhappy he slapped his players. It's called discipline.

As the Games wound down it was this word that stuck like a wart to the Indian challenge. From the size of the contingent, which ensured that although we would win more than the 23 medals we did in Hiroshima this was no triumph, to the very approach of some teams. Said Lakshman Singh, the 1982 Asian Games gold medallist in golf: "When I used to go to the course at 5.30 a.m. I would see hundreds of athletes out there in the village training. Not one of them was an Indian."