Nov 30, 1998

Athletes preparing for next month's Asian Games know no pain is great enough when you are pursuing a dream. As Associate Editor Rohit Brijnath and Principal Photographer Bandeep Singh found out, they stretch themselves at training camps regardless of the rewards that should--but often don't--come their way.

Boxer Jitender Kumar is skipping, his muscles stringing down his body like strands of rope stuck together, sweat running in silver rivulets down his chest, as he trains for next month's Asian Games in Bangkok. Ask him, Commonwealth Games silver medallist, why he boxes for India, what he wants.

"Respect, recognition, money."

Not much to ask for, you think. It is. Ask Dhanraj Pillai about respect. At half-time during September's Commonwealth Games match against England this dazzling blur in India blue is upbraided in front of his team by Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) Secretary K. Jyothikumaran for missing chances. Pep talk, Indian style. Later, his head swimming with anger, Pillai thought, "I will retire. I want to play with respect, not this."

Ask Gurcharan Singh about recognition. The boxer who exhales malevolence, winner of a gold medal in Cuba this year, snorts when you ask him if he's ever signed an autograph. "Arre, people don't even know who I am."

Ask the foreign coaches about money. Says rowing coach, Ukranian Dmitri Riabourkha: "In my country they give $50,000 (Rs 21 lakh) for Olympic gold, here it is Rs 5 lakh. And just Rs 1 lakh for an Asian gold. Not good."

Ask Jitender now whether he has the respect, recognition, money that he craves, and he laughs and says, "Cricketers have ruined everything."

There is so little to play for.

Still, in Patiala, in Bangalore, where the training camps for the Asian Games are being held, as dawn breaks you can hear the sounds of heroism through the early morning mist. The ugly clank of iron as K. Malleswari, the tension racing visibly through her muscles, heaves 100 kg over her head, then drops it and then lifts it, again and again and again, her hands a mask of blisters. The rasp of flesh on leather as Jitender pounds the bag, 80-90 punches a second, his mind awash with violence, blanking out thoughts of his schoolteacher mother who cringes at his profession. The swish of the lightweight coxless four, all of them like meditating monks rowing with eyes closed, searching for that elusive synchronicity of movement.

What is promised here is only this: pain. Gnawing ceaselessly at the body. Judoka Kamla Rawat, 48 kg, is as fresh and as delicate as the morning dew. Then she proffers her fingers and you recoil for they are bent into some arthritic nightmare. "Some break," she says with a child's smile, "some dislocate during practice, but we tape them and carry on." Is this some sisterhood of the self-flagellating? Aparna Popat, a Commonwealth silver medallist in badminton, wakes up some days with a body whose parts that don't hurt are in a minority. "You seek the pain. It's like a high. Like people get a kick out of drugs, I get a kick out of sports," she says.

Athletes know, sport is cruel. No one cares if your father's ill or your muscles ache, when the bell rings and the moment arrives, sport demands an almost impossible confluence of technique, strength and self-belief. You cannot recall a fired bullet, plead for another shot at goal, rewind that missed smash. Says weightlifter N. Kunjarani Devi: "One lift missed is the difference between gold and 5th position." One second of uncertainty and four years are flushed away. There is no allowance for imperfection. At the 1994 Hiroshima Asian Games, Mansher Singh was tied with three others for second place. Silver dangled in the distance. Then, maybe it was a gust of wind or a finger that shook, but he missed and his world collapsed. "One moment you can feel your adrenaline pumping, your heartbeat against the stock. Next moment you get a shock to the nervous system." Now in the gym, in the range, pushes himself to extremes -- however exhausted he will come through. Every day he tells himself, "I want that medal bad."

So it goes on. Three times a day, six hours a day, they lift, heave, punch, duck, run, throw, shoot. Gulab Chand, the head train ticket collector runs 255 km on tough weeks hoping one day to hold a 5000 m medal and break the shackles of anonymity. Everyone has a story. Malleswari, married for two years, hasn't seen her husband for more than 10 days; farmer Chikkappa Rai, who lives in Puthur, Karnataka, hasn't seen his weightlifter son Satish's Commonwealth Games medal because he hasn't come home yet. There is work to be done. Perhaps they heard what training expert Alexander Krassilchtchikov had to say: "Winning medals is not about pain. It's about dying."

It is all so heroic.

It is all so terribly tragic, such a collective tilting at windmills it would appear Don Quixote was their patron saint. Kunjarani and Malleswari, who between them have brought home 43 World Cup medals, don't even rate a personal masseur to unknot their muscles. When new judo mats arrive months late in Patiala, coach Nusratkhon Valiev and his team wash the floor and the mats themselves. In boxing, coach G.S. Sandhu faces a strange species: the petrified pugilist. "Gurcharan needs shorter, faster opponents to practise against but he's got such a terrific punch that they say 'don't put us against him'." Some stories are less amusing. "At Kuala Lumpur," says Sandhu, "our opponents had tapes of Jitender's every fight (he lost in the final), we had none of theirs." The video camera is still a foreign object.

There is nothing to do at the camp but train, sleep, eat, train. Routine is an athlete's ally, discipline his best friend, yet every now and then he needs to compete abroad. To assess if his training is productive, if he can reproduce practice form in competition. Athletes, like violins, need to be tested and tuned but only under the tense conditions of competition. The boxer suddenly finds the warrior in front of him is not his sparring partner who checks his punches. Blood pressure shoots, nerves jangle, adrenaline pumps. Yet coaches fume, for in Bangkok India will have too many virginal teams. The rowers flew off to their year's first international competition in November, Malleswari hasn't lifted a weight outside Indian shores this year and a judo outing to Canada in October was cancelled. "Not by me," ruefully smiles Valiev, "but by officials."

Officials haven't inhaled the truth that India is being left behind. Nine out of the world's top 10 in women's badminton are Asian; in boxer Dingko Singh's weight category he must deal with a 1996 Olympic bronze medallist and a 1998 Goodwill Games gold medallist. Hockey has just gone blind. Like a once-beautiful woman choosing to be oblivious to the havoc time has wreaked on her, hockey has refused to acknowledge and therefore arrest its decline. Beaten by Malaysia at the Commonwealth Games, new coach M.K. Kaushik begged for a two-month, non-stop camp through October-November. Fitness levels, for a start, were frightening: tests carried out on 44 national players prior to the Commonwealth Games rated 16 as good, 24 as average, four as below average. Says a sports scientist at Bangalore's Sports Authority of India centre: "This is by national parameters. By international standards they're all average."

Kaushik never got the camp he wanted. Instead a week-long debriefing session from October 5-12, skipped by several senior players, was held; the players dispersed thereafter to play domestic tournaments; a squad of 29 regrouped on October 22 only to be divided again as some of India's best flew to a pre-Asian Games tournament in Bangkok while half the team stayed back with Kaushik.

Maybe Indian sports officials who make these bizarre decisions should one morning cancel their air-conditioned meetings, take off their suits, put on shorts and walk a few playing fields. To understand just for a moment how hard it is, how complex sport has become. When Pillai was humiliated at the Commonwealth Games, his finest response to Jyothikumaran was, "Okay, I'll sit, you play."

Jyothikumaran play? He can't, nor can anyone else in the federation.

Once while listing the woes of Indian sport, Krassilchtchikov had said, "Why don't you check how many technical people there are in a federation?" We did. If you check the bio-datas of the IHF president, the senior vice-president, seven vice-presidents, secretary-general, treasurer, three joint secretaries and 10 members of the executive committee, you will find not one, not a single man, has played hockey for India. (Time to send a note to IHF President K.P.S. Gill: "Sir, just thought you should know, your equivalent in the Pakistan Hockey Federation is Akhtar Rasool. Not a legendary cop, merely a legendary hockey player. Which is probably why Pakistan came second in the Champions Trophy last month and we weren't even invited.")

No one should wonder why India which won 57 medals in 1982 in Delhi dipped to 37 in 1986, 23 in 1990 and 22 in 1994. The system stinks worse than an athlete's socks. This year the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) swore it would send only medal-hopefuls to the Asian Games -- no doubt the 240 athletes recommended fit that definition. Take men's soccer. Even if a cyclone wipes South Korea off the map, someone spikes the Japanese team's sushi and Iran defects to another continent, we will not win a medal. Still they go. The excuse: soccer is one of the events at the 2001 Afro-Asian Games being hosted by India, so if we don't send a team to Bangkok it would be bad form. No, sending a team ranked 21st in Asia is bad form. Undeterred, the debonair IOA Secretary-General Randhir Singh says, "We will win double the medals we won in 1994."

Not every official is flawed, not every athlete honourable. Indeed, as Cuban boxing coach B.I. Fernandes, displaying an affinity for Indian slang, says, "Here athletes work only if you give them bamboo." Laziness is the virus. For weeks judo coach Nusratkhon refused to divulge his team because "those who are selected then relax and those who aren't selected don't think it's worth training anymore". Foreign coaches see a flaw in the Indian sporting character, a hunger too easily satiated. Says one coach: "If an Indian is going to win bronze he believes he has already won. The gold is forgotten."

Maybe. Maybe it is the gold medallists who are forgotten. At the Commonwealth Games, Roopa Unnikrishnan puts a four-year-old gun to her shoulder and wins gold in the free-rifle prone event. Last week she flew into Chennai and not a citizen blinked. "I thought a corporate group would say 'you've proved you are capable, we'd like to sponsor you'." The phone never rang. Now she says, "It's frustrating, it's a signal to the youth that no matter what you do you're nothing."

So once the Asian Games are over, will this MBA, hoping to work in New York, quit?

No, she says. "I'll find a way to keep shooting."

She's speaking for India's athletes. They know the system will stink. But they know too that their hearts will always go on.

© Living Media India Ltd