We've got mail!

News from the 16th Asian Games, ending in Guangzhou today, should make us view India’s performance in a new light. Not against the noisy euphoria of the CWG or in the looming shadow of China, the athletics powerhouse. We need to look instead at tiny slices of history, argues Sharda Ugra

Nikolai Snesarev says it best. “There are no bad students, only bad teachers.” Thelong-distance track coach was speaking about his ‘students’ — Preeja Sridharan, Sudha Singh, Kavita Raut — who shocked the shoes off 80,000 Chinese in one luminous night for Indian athletics at the Asian Games. But the Belorussian could be speaking for all of Indian sport. When the talent of the athlete was matched by the expertise of the teacher, they brought with it not just medals, but progress. Surprised, anyone?

 

This is how India must count its 63* medals at the Guangzhou Asian Games. Not against the dizzying numbers of the Commonwealth Games or the looming shadow of China’s coffers. India’s achievement must be calculated not merely through quantity, vast yardage or long leaps, but in personal bests, in tiny slices of history.

Looking beyond
For Indian sport, the small picture from Guangzhou contains the larger sweep. In the first final, the first medal, the earliest establishment of a presence — like Snesarev’s students, the 400m runners, gymnast Ashish Kumar, rower Bajrang Lal Takhar, swimmer Virdhawal Khade, shooter Ronjon Sodhi, tennis player Devvarman, archer Tarundeep Rai and the ever-growing batallion of boxers.

India’s numbers from Guangzhou disguise their real weight. There were as many as 38 Beijing Olympic gold medallists competing, a far higher standard of competition than at the CWG. To expect top medals in two events within a month is to believe all fish can fly.

In spite of the logistics
The Asiad and CWG may always be held in the same year but usually have sizeable gaps (eight months between Melbourne and Doha in 2006, seven weeks between Manchester and Busan in 2002, 10 weeks between Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, 1998). The reasons for the four weeks between Delhi and Guangzhou are still hazy. Some say the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) didn’t want to compete with the cricket, others that the IOA didn’t believe they could be ready by March. Dead right.

Some athletes may have enjoyed the post-CWG buzz and slackened off their training, others planned smart. Swimming coach Nihar Ameen explains, “We wanted Asian Games to be the number one meet for the swimmers. Our chances in the sprint events were a bit better in Guangzhou. You had the world No. 1 and 2 at the CWG.” The ‘tapering’ for the swimmers had to be precise. Enough rest can lead to increased speed. Too much and there’s a loss of endurance, muscular power. “Tapering is an art,” Ameen said, “both psysiological and psychological.” It worked for Khade, who made two finals and won India’s first Asian swimming medal in 24 years. “Vir can taste blood now.”

The ‘students’ have passed a severe bunch of examinations over two months. They have burst off their blocks, onto to the front pages of our newspapers. Winning, losing, weeping, whooping, they have changed the way we see their sport and ourselves as a sporting nation.

Me, mine, myself...
During this time, what have their most powerful teachers — coaches, federation bosses, planners —been up to? Barring those truly devoted to their students, most of them (by charitable count 70 per cent) wheeled their way into photographs with gold medallists and are now surrounded by c-words: cut-backs, commissions, CBI.

Didn’t you see Baljit Singh Sethi, general secretary of the National Rifle Association of India for quarter of a century, squeeze into the frame with Sodhi faster than the shooter’s clay targets move? Suresh Kalmadi’s patronising pat-on-the-cheeks to Ashwini Akkunji as she stood on the 400m gold medal podium? Didn’t you see them bicker with Vladimir Chertkov, the temperamental coach who has given Indian gymnastics a structure, some oxygen, and two international medals? Don’t you see hockey dying every day because its headmasters are quarrelling?

Dirty linen
The teachers are also telling tales. Takhar and the rowers spend their lives training in old boats, on a smelly lake, living in a shed on its shores that makes the Nehru Stadium look like the Sheraton. The moment the gold was won, the Rowing Federation of India wailed about no money and a sleeping Sports Authority of India (SAI). Yes, SAI could well win a gold medal for slow motion, so complaints about them are mostly valid. Where the RFI (and many sports federations) run aground about money, is when it comes down to budgeting, expenditure and accounting.

Three days before Takhar’s gold, the sports ministry released to Parliament, a list of grants given to sports federations over the last three years. According to that list, the RFI received a total of Rs2.8 crore between 2007-2008 and July 2010. That amount should have made it possible for them to rent decent living accommodation for the rowers and buy them the washing machine and cooler (which the athletes themselves did) to make their toilet-less shed liveable. Not to mention a few boats, well in time for the Asian Games. (Competitive rowing boats cost around 18,000 euros for a coxed fours craft to 8,500 euros for a single scull). There’s a lot that can be done with Rs2.8 crore other than spin doctoring in the media.

The CWG’s spending frenzy ensured that quality coaches like Snesarev and Chertkov got into the equation. It ensured that most federations could help their athletes train well and compete enough. This spurt in a direction of correct management and planning must become a stream. The teachers of Indian sport must put their students first — always.

Sleeping on it
“India doesn’t lack money,” said former tennis player Manisha Malhotra, “it lacks expertise.” It’s a truth written into our country’s sporting history. Malhotra is in charge of the Mittal’s Champions Trust, one of few private enterprises directed at helping India’s elite athletes. Organisations like the MCT, Olympic Gold Quest and Go Sports do what the federations should be doing — helping the athlete and coach plan out a training and competition calendar, ensuring quick medical help, pushing the paperwork with government, getting advice from the best brains in the sport.

OGQ has launched the Power Your Champions programme which intends to get a million Indians to donate Rs100 a month —www.olympicgoldquest.in/ogq/pyc.htm — which could help them fund as many as 2,000 athletes for the Olympics.

India’s sporting grassroots need strengthening, more meets, more events. India’s best seniors compete in only two major meets a year — one nationals, one state, and juniors get an extra age-group event. Top swimming nations ensure their cream competes at 50 to 100 meets a year. Surely Indians could manage half that.

A four-hour flight to Guangzhou cannot be turned into a 16-hour trek, as it was for many in the Asiad contingent. Sethi’s shooting federation cannot have oddly timed selection trials to keep its growing cast of global champions obedient and in line.

It’s still not too late
But this is how India lets its Olympic athletes be treated. So when you see a village girl from Karnataka win the first 400m hurdles medal for women after P T Usha in 1998, jump to your feet, rather than snigger over how you think her future races may go.

When you see a pocket-sized Allahabadi throw himself at the pommel horse, believing he belongs to the arena of the five rings, stand up and applaud him, instead of tut-tutting at an imperfect landing.

When you see a soldier swallow his disappointment and then lift an entire contingent and a sport, salute him, rather than be cynical about ‘standards’.

The soldier Takhar, aged 29, is now looking ahead. To London, he says. And a final. The gymnast says he needs World Cups to compete in because he, too, is looking at London. And a medal. London, they all think, London 2012.

Over two months Indian sport has shown us the rich, vast and deep storehouse of its gifts.

Between now and 2012, it is this gift that must be put ahead of everything else. It must be nurtured and cherished. It’s not about money, it’s about planning, training, treatment, competition. Ask the students, they know. They learnt this simple truth in kindergarten.

Sharda Ugra is senior editor, Cricinfo.com