BackLetter from... a felicitation
The attention showered upon our Olympic medallists stem from the state's need to overcompensate for not having done enough earlier
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“How many felicitation ceremonies have you attended since returning?" someone asked her.
“Too many," the Olympian replied, while attending one more, in Mumbai this time.
Administrators, officials, politicians, fans and everybody have celebrated India’s two medals at the Rio Olympics with a great deal of enthusiasm since the Games ended in August and the athletes returned home.
There have been many awards given out, including four Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratnas, financial rewards, garlands, nondescript mementos, cars and real estate, not to mention speeches galore in praise of their performances, usually including the words “legend", “country" and “proud".
At Rohtak, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar apparently forgot P.V. Sindhu’s name and had to be prompted. At Vijayawada, the Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu decided to knock around with a racquet on the stage with Sindhu (though unlike Roger Federer, nobody seems to have been gifted a cow yet—the tennis star has been given two in the span of a decade by Swiss tennis organizers).
Three of the four Khel Ratna winners—Sindhu, who won a silver medal in badminton, Sakshi Malik, who won a bronze in wrestling, and Dipa Karmakar, who finished a gallant fourth in gymnastics, which has no notable legacy in India—have been busy attending functions and giving interviews over the past couple of weeks.
These past few days, Mumbai had a number of felicitation events for India’s sporting heroes. Last Saturday, the Sports Journalists Association of Mumbai, celebrating its 50th anniversary, gave away awards to many established and promising athletes, including Lalita Babar, who finished 10th in the 3,000m steeplechase in Rio.
On Tuesday, JSW Sports honoured three of the 39 athletes they support through their Sports Excellence Programme. Besides Malik, Vikas Krishan Yadav, who lost in the quarter-finals of the 75kg category in boxing, and Neeraj Chopra, who broke a world junior record in javelin in the under-20 World Championships, attended the event (Chopra’s throw of 86.48m, incidentally, would have won him a bronze in Rio).
At the JSW Centre in Bandra-Kurla Complex, Malik sat on a high chair on the dais, flanked by the other athletes and the JSW team. She smiled easily, answered all questions without batting an eyelid, joked around (“the same men who used to taunt us for wrestling now take selfies with us"), sat patiently through an endless stream of interviews in which questions overlapped, posed for pictures, posed for videos and thanked every significant individual and association.
The following day, Sindhu was invited over by the not-for-profit group Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ) along with her family and coach P. Gopichand at the Taj Mahal Hotel. OGQ has supported Sindhu since 2010, when she was just another budding talent.
Not surprisingly, OGQ could share their success with Sindhu only after the Maharashtra Badminton Association (MBA) got the chief minister to felicitate her, though MBA’s contribution to Hyderabad-based Sindhu’s career remains intangible. In between, Sindhu and Malik were in suburban Kandivali, where Mahindra and Mahindra gave them a Thar SUV each.
At the Taj event attended by OGQ members and reporters, Sindhu walked on to the stage every time she was called, smiled easily, answered all questions without batting an eyelid, sat through a few interviews, posed for pictures, posed for videos and thanked every significant individual and association.
The grace she showed while congratulating her victorious Rio final opponent Carolina Marin on the court, picking up her flung racquet, was evident in her interactions and patience through the rather long evening.
The felicitation was followed a few hours later with a dinner attended by OGQ supporters, before which she afforded herself a quick costume change and stayed unflappable through every request for a photo.
If all this sounds breathless, it probably was, but fortunately, Olympic participants endure tougher tests of stamina in the field of play.
It’s been argued that the attention to these three-four athletes has been over the top—you can see India’s two medals as a success or as a failure depending on how invested you are in sport. Viswanathan Anand, who played interviewer to Sindhu and Gopichand at the OGQ dinner, said these non-stop events are a result of our pent-up joy for the limited success we get in sport.
Geet Sethi, one of the founders of OGQ and an erudite sportsperson, was honest enough to admit that this is a time for introspection and see what could be done better in the future. He took solace in Sindhu’s expression of frustration and anger when she was losing her final match, a sign, he said, of her desire for gold and unwillingness to settle for second best.
Meanwhile, JSW is building a sports institute/centre in Vijayanagar, near their factories in Karnataka’s Bellary district. The centre, which has cost Rs75 crore so far, will open in December. JSW Sports director Parth Jindal said it will cost about Rs12 crore a year for the upkeep of the athletes at this residential facility, which will be borne by contributions from JSW employees plus hopefully, other companies’ corporate social responsibility initiatives.
It’s a miracle we win any medals at all, said Jindal, adding that, “my generation will not accept just two medals from the Olympics".
The consensus seems to be that we are happy to reward, not to invest, prefer to criticize than to contribute, glorify the gallant loser than to create winners. As shooter Abhinav Bindra wrote recently, India needs to decide whether it wants to be a leading sporting nation or happy with two or three medals. That will help with realistic expectations.
The exaggerated reactions from administrators come from the need to overcompensate, of guilt from not having done enough, of wanting a share of success and seeking ownership. The pragmatism of organizations such as OGQ, JSW and individuals such as Bindra and Anand serves as a reality check, reminding us that there are bigger goals to achieve.
Sindhu says she has so many bronzes, from different tournaments, that she wanted a change. She and her coach have already resumed training (she barely tried the cake that was cut in her honour) because “the longer the break, the more difficult it is to get back". That’s another reality check.
Letter From... is Mint on Sunday’s antidote to boring editor’s columns. Each week, one of our editors—Sidin Vadukut in London and Arun Janardhan in Mumbai—will send dispatches on places, people and institutions that are worth ruminating about over the weekend.
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