Another year, another Olympics. But India’s sports administrators have kept their record of embarrassing their countrymen with their idiotic and petulant behavior intact in Rio as well.
While our athletes were toiling hard to bring laurels to the country, many of our sports officials and federation chiefs were busy partying hard and making merry on tax-payers’ money.
A former official convicted in a criminal case hanging out in the Olympic village flaunting a full access pass as a special guest of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) president N. Ramachandran testified to the gravity of the situation.
The chief medical officer for the Indian contingent at Rio was another telling example of official apathy.
He happened to be a radiologist, who knows nothing about sports medicine. His only eligibility to get selected to travel to Rio was that he is the son of Tarlochan Singh, a senior IOA vice-president. But there were worse instances. It was a dentist who accompanied the Indian team at the 2012 London Paralympics!
IOA has become a hub of freeloaders. Controversies and criticisms do not bother them.
But, who will be held responsible for the country’s poor outing at Rio 2016? Who are the people who oppose the extension of the sweeping reforms recommended by the Lodha Committee to all sports bodies?
Why is the central government which releases crores of rupees to the sports associations and players on a regular basis hesitant to seek an explanation from them for the uninspiring show?
The sportspersons are also answerable to their countrymen.
In athletics, out of the 36 who made the cut, all others except Lalitha Babar (steeplechase) and Manish Rawat (race walking) produced a disappointing performance.
Marathon runners T. Gopi and Kheta Ram could at least better their personal best timings. All others utterly failed on the big stage, as they neither improved their timings nor broke any national records.
Another serious question that needs to be answered is that who gave the permission to our athletes to train in Russia, a country that is banned from international competitions by the worlds athletics governing body.
I am forced to believe that the single-point agenda of our athletes was to somehow meet the Olympic qualification mark and avail the grants allocated for training abroad.
The hype surrounding the men’s 4x400 team was huge, but it suffered the ignominy of being disqualified. How can much-hyped discus thrower Vikas Gowda and triple jumper Renjith Maheswary justify their dismal show?
Will the office-bearers of IOA or other sports bodies take responsibility for the country’s disastrous campaign in Rio and gracefully quit their posts?
I think they should take a cue from Swimming Australia, the governing body for competitive swimming in Australia, which is pressurizing the officials to resign following the country’s poor show in pools in Rio.
The functioning of the Indian Hockey Federation (HFI) is the only bright spot.
Led by Narinder Batra, the federation keeps knocking on the doors of government authorities for its quota of entitlements.
Because of the steadfast approach of the federation, the team is able to take its supporting staff along wherever it travels. Dipa Karmakar, who missed a bronze medal by a whisker to finish fourth in gymnastics, was not that lucky. Her physiotherapist was not able to travel with her, and was only rushed to Brazil after she qualified for the finals.
Olympian Adille Sumariwalla is the president of the Athletics Federation of India (AFI). Will he be able to force the athletes and trainers to do performance appraisal?
Or, more importantly, will he offer to quit owning moral responsibility for the debacle?
I was present at the Indian Grand Prix in Bengaluru, which gave Indian athletes one final chance of Olympic qualification.
To earn the ‘Grand Prix’ status, the organizers resorted to an undesirable practice. Our athletes seeking to qualify for the mega event were pitted against a lowly-ranked Mauritius team. I believe even our U-14 and U-16 teams are better than those ‘foreign athletes’.
India definitely is an emerging power in the world, but there are no signs of the country’s resurgence as a sporting nation.
The root cause for sports taking a backseat in the country is the lack of professional management. I hope our Prime Minister would intervene and do something to clean up our sports administration which is in a mess.
It should be ensured that sports associations function by adhering to norms and guidelines.
A team of professionals need to be brought in at the helm affairs to exercises the role of a watchdog over the sports bodies.
Also, there should be more committees along the lines of the Sports Council with sportspersons and experts as members.
The entire sports industry should work like a well-oiled machine. Of course, the government has too many things to take care of, but if it pays a little more attention to sports, things will definitely be on the right track.
(The author, a former international sprinter from Karnataka, is the president of Clean Sports India, a movement for corruption-free sports)