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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Olympics: The art of losing
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Olympics: The art of losing

At the Olympics, some of the biggest celebrations are of athletes who can't keep up with the rest, but are determined to have their own personal triumph

Gagan Ullalmath at the 2011 World Championships. Photo: Philippe Lopez/AFPPremium
Gagan Ullalmath at the 2011 World Championships. Photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP

It was a cheer as loud as any the London Aquatics Centre witnessed during the 2012 Olympics. If you had just turned on the television, you might have thought a British athlete had narrowly edged out someone in a nail-biting finish to take gold. Instead, a 20-year-old Indian swimmer named Gagan Ullalmath had just finished his 1500m freestyle heat in last position, almost a whole minute after the rest of the participants. For Indian sports fans, deep-rooted insecurities began poking at nerves till our whole bodies were tingling with doubt. Was this a patronizing cheer? Was the British crowd looking with pity upon this young man from one of their former colonies, thinking, poor kid, he’s trying so hard to keep up with the first world?

Ullalmath heard no subtext in the applause. He had finished his 28th lap just before the rest of the field finished the 30-lap race, so he had to swim nearly two entire lengths of the pool on his own. The cheers began in earnest as he turned to enter his final lap. Usually, you can’t hear much when you’re swimming. But in London, with the stands close to the pool on either side, an echo was being created, so Ullalmath could hear everything even when his head was in the water. He still remembers that about the experience now, four years later. “It was one of the most memorable moments of my life. I’m getting goose bumps just talking about it," he says over a Skype call. “As soon as I finished and saw people clapping for me, I didn’t bother about my timing in the race. I just thought to myself, I’ve done my job." He even remembers watching the replay of the race on television and one of the commentators saying his stroke was similar to that of Grant Hackett, a two-time Olympic gold-medallist in the 1500m freestyle.

When you witness Ullalmath’s joy in talking about that reception, you realize it doesn’t matter whether it was tinged with some inadvertent condescension. It gave a young swimmer his Olympic moment, which is all he had been sent there for.

Ullalmath had gone to the Olympics thanks to the ‘universality clause’, which allows nations who do not have any qualified athletes in a particular sport to enter one so long as he fulfils certain criteria. His best time in the 1500m freestyle was 15 minutes 59 seconds, which was around 30 seconds slower than any of his competitors at the London Games. It was clear he was not going to get anywhere near the final. He was being sent to London to do his best and enjoy an opportunity that, he admits, took him completely by surprise when it arrived.

The Olympics has always promoted global participation and allowed in athletes who have no chance of competing for medals but who they hope will inspire other sportsmen in their countries just by their presence at the Games. This means there are often participants who finish embarrassingly far behind everyone else. But many of these underdogs turn into stars, with the audience celebrating their massive losses as acts of valour.

Back in 1964, a Sri Lankan long-distance runner named Ranatunga Karunananda ran so slowly in the 10,000-metre event that the winners passed him three times. Despite the crowd beginning to boo him, Karunanada carried on, and by his last lap, the jeers had turned to a rousing ovation. He became an overnight celebrity in Tokyo, especially after he revealed he had finished the race despite an illness because he had promised his daughter he would.

Click here to see Eric Moussambani talk about his famous 2000 Sydney Olympics race

Even more incredible was the story of Eric Moussambani, a swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who went to the 2000 Sydney Olympics because he was the only man in his country to answer a radio advertisement asking members of the public if they would like to fill a wild card spot the tiny African nation had been offered. Moussambani had never even seen a 50-metre swimming pool when he arrived at the Games. He had practised in a small hotel pool and in a river, learning how to swim from fishermen. He looked petrified when he came out for his 100m freestyle heat. Understandably so. He had just been taught how to dive correctly in the past few days, by a South African coach who saw him floundering around during practice sessions at the Sydney International Aquatic Centre.

When the other two contestants in his heat were disqualified for a false start, Moussambani looked utterly confused. He thought he was the one being removed. Then, when he realized he had to swim the heat alone, he grew more nervous. He set off, splashed around frantically for the first 25 metres and then seemed to run out of steam. The second lap was excruciating. It looked like he was going to have to grab hold of the rope, unheard of in a sprint event. But the crowd lapped it up, as did the media after he finished the race—in a time that was twice that of the eventual winner’s. It seemed it did not matter that Moussambani was only completing two lengths of an Olympic-size swimming pool, something even most casual swimmers can do easily. What mattered was that for him, it was clearly the equivalent of ascending Everest.

While the sheer oddness of some of these underdogs’ stories endears them to fans, one has to question whether such low standards of performance make a mockery of the Olympics. Is it really fair that elite athletes who are pushing the limits of human performance have to weave in and out of the circus that tends to follow these crazy tales? Is it fair to the many athletes who have trained for years and missed out by milliseconds, millimetres and milligrams on qualification to see someone much slower, lower and weaker than them earn the tag of an Olympian when they are denied it?

Ullalmath at least completed a distance race in a time that, though slow for an athlete, is still out of the reach of any recreational sportsman. But timings such as Moussambani’s are not. Or consider the slowest time in the 100m sprint at the London Games, 12.81 seconds by Timi Garstang of the Marshall Islands, whose best time before the Olympics was 12.56. That wouldn’t win a school race in many cities. And while Moussambani was born in a poverty-stricken country, Garstang was born in California, in the US.

The other point of concern is whether the universality clause is actually helping countries develop their sports or is just offering a few athletes a free trip to the Olympics. Equatorial Guinea has not had another swimmer at the Olympics since 2000; Moussambani, by the way, is now the national swimming coach. Sri Lanka has won just one medal in athletics since 1964.

Pradeep Kumar, who has coached Ullalmath since he began swimming and is India’s national swimming coach, says some of the International Olympic Committee’s rules seem contradictory. While earlier any swimmer who reached the A or B qualifying times set by the IOC for each event became an Olympian, now there are a fixed number of swimmers allowed entry. This leads to odd situations. In 2012, for example, India had four swimmers who had met the Olympics’ qualifying time. But in the end, it was Ullalmath, who was 14 seconds outside the qualifying time in the 1500m freestyle, who was India’s sole representative in the pool.

One of the reasons Ullalmath was selected was that he was just 20 and there was hope he would use the experience he gained in 2012 to push on and be more competitive in the next Games. But he suffered a shoulder injury that ruled him out of competition in 2013. He had also got a job as an inspector in the Income Tax department, which left him with little time to train. In 2014, he gave up competitive swimming.

Ullalmath says he will always introduce himself first as an Olympian. “Before I say I am an Income Tax inspector, I will say I’m an Olympian. Once an Olympian, always an Olympian. Nobody can take that tag away from me." And he did not earn it just by luck, he insists. He had been training to try to qualify for the Olympics for two years and had made it to the World Swimming Championships in 2011 – that actually turned out to be one of the things that made him eligible for a universality place in London 2012.

He flew to London less than a month after he was told he was going to be an Olympian and ended up getting a fever a week before his race. The crowd at the London Aquatics Centre did not know all this. But perhaps they read some of it in his loping strokes. Perhaps it was not sympathy, but true empathy that sprung their palms into applause. Everyone has lost; everyone has looked at a task and, like Moussambani, felt they have never seen anything like it; everyone has felt, like Ullalmath, that they are swimming alone. And they would all have liked to hear the sound of support ripple through the water.

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Published: 29 Jul 2016, 03:59 PM IST
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