2016: LADLI YEAR IN SPORTS

Here’s reliving the year gone by from the tracks, badminton stadia, rowing stations, and wrestling mats where history was made and written from rather unexpected quarters

It was 2008, London. The star moment of the Big Games was about to sparkle. Superstar Usain Bolt was to run the 100 metres final in the evening. We journalists were standing around, talking, waiting and soaking in the atmosphere of a full-house stadium through the afternoon. An Australia-based sports author was there too. Conversation veered towards sports book-writing and who could be an Indian subject for his next mount. Not many names could be conjured up. Someone suggested MS Dhoni. The author preferred a non-cricket achiever. Sakshi Malik, PV Sindhu, Dipa Karmakar — they didn’t occur to anyone. Much later, Mary Kom was discussed — and dismissed — as a done to death sports personality, what with a movie and all that under her punch already.

Today, he can choose from a raffle. Besides the ones mentioned above, there are many more — Dutee Chand and Lalita Babar, to name a few. Recently, the much-feted Phogat sisters made a splash as muses of Aamir Khan’s movieDangal. Today, we know who Dipa Karmakar is, where she lives, how she trains, what her Twitter handle is. Today, we know, Sakshi Malik’s mother is an Anganwadi supervisor, and father, a bus driver. We also know that PV Sindhu loves the Hyderabadi biryani but has often been compelled to give it up for months leading to competitions and how her phone is taken away by her coach during tournaments. None of these, mind you, are in any which way, connected to India’s religion sport, cricket.

Today, we also dribble our eyes over the live sport section of newspapers to know where we can see Sindhu live in action during a super series abroad. We get angry if Indian television has not slotted the live telecast of non-cricketing niche sports like badminton, or for that matter even pro-boxing where Vijender Singh has been making waves thus far. The first pro fight that Vijender starred in was not telecast live on any Indian sport channel. But the online traffic of viewers from India was so huge that the following bouts were rushed in live. Next, the bouts started happening physically in India with the third one scheduled in Delhi recently.

Such stardom around India’s non-cricketing sporting community and disciplines has only just begun and you can, to a large extent, thank three performances at Rio, which leads us directly to the leading ladies of Indian sport. A 118-strong Indian contingent, more men than women, brought back only two medals, both by women, none by men. So, it was only natural that the hamari ladli campaign blazed the social media. States fought over owning Sindhu. Money was showered in a race by politicos announcing cash rewards. Land was given away. A lot happened and then died down.

Usually, women athletes in India are in the news for reasons far removed from the sport they play, even further away for any kind of sporting achievement. Controversies yes, doping yes, gender issues yes. But rarely any pedestal talk. Till Rio came, and went with a dismal mark on the medal tally. The six medals in London 2008 shrunk to just two, shooting went

into the bin, so did wrestling (men), and boxing — disciplines that were starting to be considered the sunshine sports of India after 2008.

But 2016 was not about the men — at all. It was about the women — as never before. Three of them wrote the Rio story just when a medal washout was staring a shocked and desperate nation. That’s when a pithy little girl from a pithy little sport in India lit the hearts. As Star Sports cameras failed to focus on her in the preliminaries to the final, Twitter went ablaze with disappointment. After all, who before her had actually shown the determination of reaching a final of gymnastics at the Big Games?

No, she didn’t win a medal. But she emerged as the story of middle class India, the only woman artistic gymnast to have first qualified for the Olympics, next making it to the final, then missing a bronze by a whisker and finally coming fourth in a world where India’s presence is as unheard of as oxygen is on the moon.

It is highly ironical that Dipa got the flaming desire to unfurl the gymnastic flag for the nation at a global podium after getting inspired by watching Ashish Kumar perform at the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Today, the Allahabad gymnast Ashish is in near oblivion, thanks to the federation’s mismanagement and lack of training facilities. They sacked his foreign coach without premise and killed his talent.

Dipa faced other and similar hurdles. A flat foot was overcome with the most difficult private battle of training as a six-year-old. With sheer hard work and dedication, she carved an arch in her sole. She even beat the lack of infrastructure and equipment by training on crash mats and junked scooter spare parts. She symbolises a new India where grit has grown alongside gumption, especially among the unknown faces and families of what one calls the lost subcontinent of sports.

“I feel ecstatic as people are talking about gymnastics and know the sport now. Parents are sending their kids to learn this sport. When I qualified for Rio, there was a buzz which helped the popularity of gymnastics in India. Until my performance, the aim for Indian gymnasts was just to qualify for the Olympics. But from now on, every Olympic-bound Indian gymnast will target a medal. The popularity of gymnastics will increase only through performances,” she says on phone from Agartala.

Sakshi Malik’s flat foot problem may not have been physical but was definitely geographical and gender-oriented. She comes from a State where the gender equation is the most skewed in India, where being a woman is close to serving a penance and where the son syndrome is so pronounced that the fair sex is a prisoner of a wanton patriarchal cordon. Perhaps, that was what taught this doughty performer the art of snatching victory when all’s lost, like she did while fighting her bout of life against the Kyrgyzstan wrestler at Rio and bagging an unprecedented bronze when she was not even on the firmament of public imagination.

She feels things have changed for wrestling and people have started recognising wrestlers. “More medals will help further develop this sport,” she says. She accords much of this to the gaining popularity of the wrestling league. “Last year, we had the Pro Wrestling League (PWL) for the first time. It was an event where top world wrestlers came and our upcoming wrestlers got a chance for international exposure within the country. Of course, my win at Olympics gave it a push too,” she says.

“It has done a lot for the game. The PWL has given a platform to wrestlers like us to learn and compete with international wrestlers and help us prepare for bigger global events outside the country. It is a platform for budding wrestlers to prove their mettle,” she adds.

PV Sindhu, on the other hand, had the best coach in India and the best academy in India to train at. So, she was not as dispossessed as the other girls in sport. But, at the world stage, Indian badminton is an underprivileged sport known to have broken the barrier of mediocrity in few individual spurts over the decades. Prakash Padukone in the previous century, Pullela Gopichand in this one, and Saina Nehwal currently are the achievers you can count on your fingers. And now there’s Sindhu, who has been blazing a trail in the footsteps of her senior Saina. She is a success story which emphatically re-emphasises the argument that good facilities, good training, good coaching, and good nutrition can make a sporting star even with the globally acknowledged genetic shortcomings in the Indian make.

“With so many people expecting a medal at Rio, it was fantastic that it came in the form of badminton and it got good recognition as a sport. Many kids have taken up badminton after Olympics and I hope with the Pro Badminton League, the game will go higher. I feel a league should take place every year and more academies should come up at every State/district headquarters,” she says.

India’s Rio women may be the brightest spark in a sector which is accorded only 1/16th of the annual Governmental Budget, but they do not limit the nation’s gaming story to issues of the so-called weaker sex.

The big three apart, the other dawn that the arena has seen is India’s emergence as a global sporting market. For one, the business of sport has drawn the globe’s football administrators to India and its one billion plus potential. Hockey giants see money in the Indian league as does the so-far invitational tennis in the form of the Indian Premier Tennis League (IPTL). Then, there are the Premier Badminton League, the Pro Wrestling League, the Kabaddi League, and the Hockey India League which have been on a constant climb, alongside the sportspersons representing it, both in and out of television.

It is no mean achievement that India has had the pocket to pay huge salaries to league players, especially foreign sporting giants like Roger Federer. The Indian Sports Salaries Report 2016, which surveyed eight leagues, including IPL, ISL, HIL and IPTL, tells you that 521 Indian players got Rs296 crore as total salary, and 336 foreign players took a total of Rs527 crore this year. This explodes the public perception that cricketers are the highest earners in Indian leagues. “Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are the highest earning players with Rs26 crore plus each for playing in the IPT,” the report says.

Among the top domestic players, wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt was the highest paid per minute with Rs1.65 lakh for every 60 seconds he spent in the arena, and seventh in the overall list. “Top six players are all tennis players, earning Rs6 lakh per minute or more in the IPTL,” the report says. Among cricketers, Yuvraj Singh is the highest paid on per minute basis at Rs1.01 lakh, although he stood 17th in the overall index. “Virat Kohli ranks 29th, MS Dhoni ranks 34th, and Suresh Raina 48th — earning way below Rs75,000 per minute,” the report adds.

Yes, there is still talk of sporting federations being in a mess, corruption of administrators, lack of infrastructure and pitiable training sites at the Government level, but rays of commitment to sports have started peeping in from congenital darkness. The much-needed private initiative in sport has steadily grown through corporate involvement, as has the dint of the athletes themselves, and 2016 will go down in sporting history as the year that concretised this involvement which started taking baby steps over the last decade, or should we say around the time Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore shot down a silver at the 2004 Games, and then Abhinav Bindra came back with a solitary Indian gold, and Vijender Singh punched in a bronze at Beijing.

Corporate initiative in tumultuous democracies like India, which are emerging from the Third World maze of socio-economic implosions, is crucial, especially in the backburner sector of sports. Even in developed economies like the US, athletes largely depend on private funding. More than 100 US athletes started individual funding portals for donations from the general public. Despite only 10 per cent of the US Olympic Committee’s finances being actually spent on athletes, the US topped the Rio medals tally, thanks largely to the private funding.

In India, the public sector India Infrastructure Finance Company Limited, has contributed Rs30 crore to national sports development over a period of three years. The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) received donations from Reliance Jio, Edelweiss Financial Services, Amul, Tata Salt, Herbalife and Li Ning and SBJ.

Sport boosting organisations, like the JSW Sports of the OP Jindal Group and the Quest For Gold initiative, have sponsored India’s grown-up and growing sporting potential. So, if a steeplechaser was short-shrifted because her federation would not buy her the required Rs10,000 running shoes unavailable in India, a private funder rushed in and helped out. That’s where India changed this year. That’s where India’s future lies. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 1 January, 2017