How's an athlete to find their feat?

The hurdles that Indian sportspersons — the non-cricketing ones — face just to get to the international arena make the actual competition pale in comparison. Who is to blame? The government, sports fans, or both?

August 19, 2016 05:41 pm | Updated August 20, 2016 04:58 pm IST

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When I was about seven, eight years old, my father’s great dream and vision for me was to become an athlete who would represent the country. I was put into coaching for swimming, track and field coaching, and table tennis — in the hope that even if I wasn’t good at one, I would be able to succeed in another, for they were all such varied forms of sports, and required entirely different skills.

My single-greatest achievement from all this training, however, was my ability to consecutively, and spectacularly, fail in all of them. I was clumsy in the water, and would fall flat in, instead of diving, inflicting pain not only on myself but everyone else around me as well. My pumpkin like figure wasn’t the most conducive for track and field, and as for table tennis, it turned out that I had the hand-eye co-ordination of a dead squirrel.

My parents finally gave up on me after that. I was relieved, but it was only during my adult years did my mostly traumatic memories of being coached in sports bring about two very important realisations — that I inherited my father’s radical imagination, and more importantly, how expensive sports coaching could be. The second realisation came to me while I was trying to fork swimming pool fees from my own salary — just getting access to a quality pool was expensive. Add coaching fees to that, and the equipment, and it becomes clear that sports isn’t something that you get into because you want to see how good you are. I was lucky to have had parents who thought that learning to play sport was important to even give me the opportunity of learning a few, and most importantly, I was lucky to have come from a position of privilege, that allowed to me fail despite the significant monetary expenditure that my failure might cost.

Today I laugh about my sports disasters, but I know that there are plenty of deserving, more talented young people out there who would’ve killed for my upbringing, the encouragement that my parents showered on me, and the access I had to quality coaching and facilities.

Dipa Karmakar, India’s most successful gymnast and fourth place finisher in this year’s Olympics vaulting event, began her journey in the sport in a gym that didn’t have a vaulting table, and that they would stack mats on top of each other, to make do. >She goes on to tell the BBC about how the gym would flood during the monsoons, and that “there would be rats and cockroaches” around. Dipa had to borrow a gymnastic dress for her first competition, and competed without shoes. It’s incredible to just think about the kind perseverance that Dipa must have had to not only push through the odds, but even master one of the most difficult moves in the world, the Produnova, which earned her a medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

It’s equally incredible to think that our country’s sports ministry had nothing to do with it. Even after her historic qualification in the Rio Olympics, Dipa’s long time physio wasn’t allowed to travel with her, because >it was considered too “wasteful” . >The Sports Ministry bureaucrats flying Business Class and taking unauthorised persons along with them on what is in effect a fully paid vacation, however, wasn’t considered to be so. It was only after Dipa qualified in the vaulting event at Rio, and became a medal hopeful that her physio was flown in. It’s both hilarious, and tragic that a medal hopeful had to undergo this kind of treatment in our country, when >other countries do all that they can to squeeze medals out from all their contestants .

Now, whose fault is this situation? Is it the government’s, for not providing a sound foundation, or encouragement for our sports people? Or is it our own, for paying attention only to, and in turn creating a profitable, investor-friendly environment only out of cricket? I would say that while it is mostly the former’s, and it also, partly, our own.

The government’s sporting systems, or the lack of it, is such that it is impossible for someone from underprivileged backgrounds to even contemplate a career in sports, for it a Catch-22 situation. It is very expensive to get access to good coaching and facilities, and you cannot get aid from the government unless you win a medal at a major tournament, a feat that requires access to expensive coaching and facilities. >Amitava Kumar writes in the New Yorker about an Olympic commentator who was heard talking about how “American players were equipped with small devices that measured their movements and their level of fatigue.

The U.S. coach checked the data from those devices and, accordingly, made substitutions during the game”. Here, our sports persons, our capable-of-winning-a-medal sports persons, who come from the farthest nooks and the most difficult crannies of our country (Sakshi Malik, our Bronze medal winner comes from Haryana, where female infanticide is rampant), aren’t allowed the most basic of facilities, even after qualifying for prestigious events. It doesn’t help that the Government’s idea of sports ministers is those who appear to have a superficial interest in our athletes. Our sports minister, Vijay Goel, took it up a notch by embarrassing the nation to the point where >he had to be sent back home from Rio . Sandip Roy writes in detail for The Huffington Post about the >problems that plague our athletes in Rio , including but not limited to a Chief Medical Officer who is actually a radiologist and sits by the pool prescribing Combiflam to athletes.

PV Sindhu's meteoric rise in the Rio Olympics can be attributed to her own hard work, >the hard work of her coach, P Gopichand, and her parents , who started their day at 4.30 a.m. to ensure that Sindhu didn’t miss practice at her coaching academy, which was 56 kilometres away. Even before the match began, I felt like, "If she wins the gold, it will not be because of our country. It will be despite it."

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