Here's the punchline. An FIH (hockey's governing body) Commission last month, in search of new coaches for their development programme, apparently felt Indian coaches had more playing than coaching experience. Only D'Souza, it seems, was considered to be well versed enough in the science modern hockey.

An inability to pick the right man for the job, an ignorance of how sport has evolved tactically, are just some of the other absent pieces of the sporting jigsaw that puzzles India. Even in cricket, panic in defeat results in hasty execution of coaches. Anshuman Gaekwad is intelligent and organised, has just begun moulding a team, but he coaches with his head on the guillotine. Ask Sandeep Patil, Madan Lal.

Money, in a poor land, also continues to retard progress. Tennis players, for instance, need three to four rackets worth Rs 7,000-Rs 9,000 each, a dozen balls a week which is Rs 800, plus shell out for court bookings. Eventually they need coaches like Bob Carmichael, who trains Leander for about $100,000 a year. Sponsors, understandably, look more to cricket. Other sports suffer. Simi Mehra, India's first woman to qualify for golf's US Open (one of the four major tournaments), has no sponsor. Hockey players, barring Dhanraj Pillai and the odd other, are not considered worthy by major brands. So, unlike the university system that supports and breeds athletes in the US, here athletes put employment as their first priority.

The Indian athlete also is not accorded the dignity he deserves. To watch an Indian Olympian bend down to touch an official's feet, fearful of disfavour, is horrifying. Unless a nation accords respect to its athletes, parents will never view it as a respectable career alternative.

Facilities remain a contentious issue. School sport, the base, is defunct. Modern stadiums are fashioned, but then fall into gradual disrepair. Young Indian hockey players still grow up on grass where the body is held erect, the stick vertical. To adapt to astro-turf where the body is crouched and the stick held horizontal is not easy. Even so, facilities are not an impossible impediment to hurdle. Kenyan cross-country runners -- the world's best by far -- used to live in a school on bunk beds, eat maize porridge daily and bathe with water from a tap in the garden.

Education is vital too, for many Indian athletes, emerging from small towns and villages, cannot grasp the tactics and developments of modern sport. Athletes too are not hungry enough. Boxers win medals then leave camp for long holidays. Rarely will a hockey player stay on an extra half hour after regular training to refine a particular skill. Hard working Michael Jordan once hit a teammate, irritated by his lack of effort. Sachin Tendulkar, genius maybe, still trained at the nets for Shane Warne. It is this rage for perfection, that eventually is the essence of champions. And neither money, nor facilities, nor coaches, are required for that.

--Rohit Brijnath

The Siddis are descendants of African slaves who escaped from Portuguese slavers in Goa. Sports officials believed that since Africans make such fine athletes so would the Siddis. True, many tribals like Lawrence won local championships. But they got no further, unprepared as they were for the demands of modern sport.

Ever since Jesse Owens dominated the 1936 Berlin Olympics the widespread notion is that blacks hold a genetic advantage. "The change in genetic material is a very, very slow process," explains Sher Ali, a geneticist at the National Institute of Immunology. "And Africans have been around longer than any other race in the world." For 200,000 years they have led hard, physical lives, passing on traits of strength from generation to generation. The result, Ali says, is the overexpression of the genes that control stamina and resistance.

So do genes matter or don't they? Scientists haven't yet found clear paths through the helical wilderness -- there are three billion possible pairings of the four basic molecules of DNA, the molecular blueprint of life -- but they know that the difference between races, genetically speaking, is infinitesimal. The DNA of any two human beings is 99.9 per cent identical.

In that 0.1 per cent seems to lie differences between the races: appearance, musculature and height. We know that babies of some ethnic groups develop physical skills more rapidly than others. But we also know that identical twins -- who have the exact genetic material -- separated at birth and raised in different environments often end up with vastly different abilities.

So the Siddis, like other Indians, end up being outjumped and outsprinted. Sporting ability is determined only partly by genes. "No country in the world has a superior set of people," stresses Ali. Nurturing the gifts of nature -- diet, training, living conditions -- are as important, if not more important, than the gifts themselves. That's why China and the Koreas, nations that were once on a par with India in sports, now leave us gasping for breath.

The domination of sport by blacks indicates DNA's mysterious magic, but regardless of what the genes prescribe, facilities, training and a desire to excel more than tip the balance. Every race has a chance for sporting greatness: Indians just haven't taken that chance.

--Samar Halarnkar