Opinion
India's Olympic outfits: Don't let gloss triumph over grit
Summary
- We spent two days grumbling about how the Indian contingent looked at the opening ceremony in Paris instead of cheering the team and asking if they were well equipped to do their best. Grace demands that we talk about their trials, tribulations and performances, instead of picking on the trivial.
I rarely feel sorry for the cricket team, but last weekend, I did. We regularly send “the boys" out to play in an unflatteringly gluey shade of blue—this year, accentuated with bright orange—covered with digitally printed sponsor names that overshadow their own.
Yet, no one bemoans the way they look, feels disgraced by their uniforms, or expresses toe-curling shame about their appearance. They represent India and its interests on a global stage too; surely their jerseys require more design input. If not their practical playing jerseys, maybe their off-field navy India blazers could be handwoven and made to shine with a touch of embroidery?
Instead, it seems all our demands for top-quality clothing and showy fabric are reserved for the Olympic contingent of athletes, who looked perfectly presentable in white, saffron and green, carrying off the colours of the flag with pride.
India’s team uniforms for the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics seemed neither grand nor glamorous to a country that’s grown used to the shimmering parades of billionaire and celebrity weddings. The saris and kurtas with jackets that the team wore were practical and relaxed, and didn’t make a statement—and unfortunately, we now expect flash-bang from everything, on an endless scroll.
While the scandal of mildly crumpled kurtas was being disguised as concern for sportspersons and pride in India’s now creased image, this misdirected rage actually indicates how little we care for athletes.
We spent two days grumbling about how they looked during the opening ceremony, rather than cheering the fact that this is the second-largest contingent in the history of Independent India, with a large squad of shooters and track-and-field participants; 47 of the 117 athletes are women, and they include some of our best medal hopes, from P.V. Sindhu (badminton) and Nikhat Zareen (boxing) to debutants Jyothi Yarraji (track and field, hurdles) and Parul Chaudhary (track and field, steeplechase), as Mint Lounge reported in our Olympics special last weekend.
Also read: How a group of champion women is driving India’s Olympics dreams
The Indian athletes who participated in the ceremony on the Seine last Friday had spent most of their lives in preparation for that moment, pushing through the kinds of challenges that armchair commentators, myself included, cannot imagine.
Hockey’s Sumit Kumar Walmiki, for instance, has often talked about his childhood—as a nine-year-old, he’d clean a dhaaba every morning before school and hockey practice to bring home a package of food that the family ate for the day.
Just a few months ago, as we all saw, Vinesh Phogat and other wrestlers spent days in protest, were manhandled by the police and were reprimanded as “indisciplined" for calling out sexual harassment and demanding action against it.
After the trauma of those weeks, Phogat had to drop down a weight category to qualify for the Olympics, and in effect, learn to master her sport again to represent India.
Yet, when Sindhu (who like Phogat is at her third Olympics), flag-bearer for the team, posted a photograph of herself in the orange-and-green bordered sari and wrote that carrying the Indian flag was “one of the greatest honors of my life," a number of comments that followed were about her clothing. There’s a streak of misogyny that’s hard to ignore when people—male or female—pick on what she wore, rather than what she said.
Also read: The hunger driving India’s hockey dreams
Could the Indian Olympic team have been better dressed? Could the show of sporting strength also have been a parade of India’s textile history? Maybe. After all, a few other countries managed it. But these gaps are symptoms of the inconsistency and unpredictability of sports administration in India.
Their interest in sport, like ours, can be desultory or keen, depending on the issue, the game and the people involved. Teams from other countries have been cheerfully unboxing high performance gear at the #olympicvillage for their followers on Instagram. Instead of worrying about ceremonial uniforms, it might be pertinent to find out if Indian athletes have the gear in which they’ll be able to perform their best.
Could the critics, instead, have asked questions—before the team reached Paris—about the support they got as they trained, recovered from injury, sought sponsors, went through selection processes and prepared for these contests?
Self-righteous outrage and solidarity, unfortunately, are rarely expressed at such volume when athletes complain about lack of funding, poor quality equipment, badly-maintained training facilities, politics in selection, corruption and sexual harassment. We don’t think about what sportspersons really need, but more about their image on a stage.
Indian athletes don’t need this defence, or any other, for they fight far greater battles everyday just to keep playing. But when they were celebrating their moment at the Olympics opening ceremony, the gracious thing for us to do might have been to cheer for them, their spirit and their accomplishments, instead of picking on the way they looked. Viscose or handloom, woven or printed—we are so easily distracted into focusing on the trivial instead of the real.
