WHEN MEDALS ARE MISSED BECAUSE OF CALLOUS SPORTS MANAGEMENT

WHEN MEDALS ARE MISSED BECAUSE OF CALLOUS SPORTS MANAGEMENT 

Golfer Aditi Ashok revealed a rather sad fact. She was provided accommodation about one and a half hour drive from the Olympic village by the Indian Olympic authorities. On the penultimate day a typhoon alarm interrupted golfing and the final round was scheduled for the last day of the Games. Being located so far from the Olympic village and having an early morning schedule, Aditi had to wake up at three in the morning, take an unusually early breakfast and had to then report at the golf course on time. Such an unsettling schedule certainly affected her performance and it could have been avoided by better accommodation arranged for her by the concerned Indian Sports authority as was done by its US counterpart. The eventual gold medallist, Nelly Korda from USA, was housed just two minutes away from the golf course. This often makes all the difference in high-level sports, Aditi Ashok said. She pointed this out not as an excuse for her failure to win a medal after being in second position behind Nelly Korda till the penultimate day but as a lacuna in Indian sports management which so often thwart Indian competitors from having a better shot at the Olympic medals. One more thing she said. The Indian Olympic federation gave her a sum of money for her training barely sixty days before the #Tokyo2020 #Olympics, only after she had qualified for the Games. But it was too late a monetary grant and she could not put it to any use due to paucity of preparation time. Help should have been provided much earlier if any fruitful utilisation was to be made of it.

It was sad to hear these from an athlete who with better facilities could have struck gold this time, perhaps. Alas, that was not to be ! Meanwhile, chaos in the name of euphoria continues to reign post Neeraj Chopra's javelin gold and it does not seem that India has quite woken up to a rational understanding of things regarding how she may produce consistently better results each time at the Olympic Games. As Mahesh Bhupathi succinctly put it that bad sports management and politics in federations would continue to be the Achilles heel in Indian sports for the foreseeable future and that it was private philanthropy by organisations such as the 'Olympic Gold Quest' and the like, and not the Government, which had been of any real help for sportspersons in the past. Bishen Singh Bedi, when asked, attributed solitary successes in Indian sports here and there to Providence and not to any concerted governmental effort.

Despite the hullabaloo, the general euphoria over the #Tokyo2020 achievements and our high future hopes, these experts seem to have summed up India's sporting fate that awaits her in the future. Will it be any better then in the years ahead or will the inertia of mass national sporting failure continue? I, for one, am rather pessimistic about it all and that too in a rather realistic way. By the way, what was the Prime Minister's looming poster that dwarfed the combined size of the posters of the Olympic medallists doing at the post-return Tokyo felicitation stage? There you see how political capital is made even out of sporting achievement even as the nation's sporting future is casually cast to the four winds to perish. Now, do not say that whatever help the Government has given was great almsgiving after all. Athletes need none such. They have a legitimate right to such grants and the Government is doing them no great favour in any way. Whose money is it after all?

Written by Sugata Bose