Devangshu Datta: Sport as means to free rides

OVERVIEW

On the eve of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, a Canadian friend asked me what he considered "a stupid question" while making advance apologies. He enquired: Does India have a contingent at all?

It took a little googling before I could confirm that yes indeed, there was a team of sorts. The next day, I learnt that 24 Indians had shown up at Turin. Twenty of them were officials belonging to the Indian Winter Olympic Games Federation and four were competing athletes.

There would have been zero media coverage in India had it not been for the fact that one of the "fab-four" boycotted the opening ceremony in protest after the 20 officials allegedly denied him the chance to lead the marchpast.

The natural reaction to the ratio is disgust. However, an official to competitor ratio of 5: 1 is not particularly high in the context of Indian Olympic contingents. The overabundance of officials is usually less obvious at the summer games because there are also a substantial number of competitors. Even there, in certain disciplines, the Indian contingent usually consists of zero competitors and many officials.

In the Winter Games, the ratio appears to be totally obscene because the competitive base is so very low. Winter sports are not mainstream Indian entertainment and tend to be very expensive both in terms of equipment and of facilities. It is creditable that there are some competitors at all at Turin "" India made its Winter Olympic debut just four years ago.

However, even if these disciplines are unknown or unpopular here, they are legitimate and universally recognised sporting disciplines. That being so, there is official funding available. The availability of official funding makes it certain that there will be officials "" even if those officials are overseeing disciplines that are not practised.

It is very easy to start up an Indian sporting federation and to control it in perpetuity. The provisions of the Societies Act apply. All you have to do is write a constitution that doesn't conflict with the provisions of the Act. There have to be regular meetings and an electoral process of some sort. You have to submit a "zero or negative" P&L and balance-sheet regularly to gain and maintain recognition by the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs as a non-profit organisation. If the discipline is recognised, there's a damn good chance of wrangling official funding out of the ministry as well.

These are very broad guidelines. You can organise the electoral process in such a way as to be most suitable for the maintenance of your power. If you like a one-man, one-vote process, you can turn it into a tight little club of cronies. If you want to license state federations as members that vote by proxy, you can do that.

Kenneth Arrow proved in his Impossibility Theorem that it was quite possible in theory for a widely acceptable system and set of choices to lead to an outcome where a single agent's preferences dominated. If you set up and own an Indian sporting federation, you need to use your creative ingenuity to design an electoral process where you can prove the Impossibility Theorem in practice and thereby set yourself up as dictator. You will note that there is no need to practise the sport at all. The number of competitors in a given sport could be an "empty set"; you can hold championships or not.

If you want more than just ministry largesse, you must build a mass base. Again, the need for excellence is peripheral. Soccer, for example, is popular regardless of pathetic standards. Hockey retains residual popularity despite mismanagement and sub-par results. Excellence is often seen as a threat because a Dhanraj Pillai or a Prakash Padukone can challenge the entrenched gnomes.

Sports politics is murky everywhere. But elsewhere, there is a less tenuous connection between the delivery of results and the rewards of pelf and power. This lack of connectivity is why champions arise despite rather than because of the Indian sporting system.