By Irineu Gonsalves.

THE OLYMPIC flame is extinguished and the Athens Olympics is now history.  Only memories, pleasant and poignant remain.  Yet again, the Olympics proved that it was a cementing force.  Before the Games began, Athens’ ability to play host to a venture of this magnitude was considered suspect.  But this proved wrong once the show began with an exotic opening ceremony.  In the end not many believed that the Games were the greatest ever.

There are no two opinions about the United States having the biggest reservoir of talent, facilities for training, best of coaches and infrastructure, to be identified as the major power, especially after the disintegration of the mighty Soviet Union.  The other nations particularly China and Japan certainly performed well.  Evidence of that came when the European monopoly was dera-iled by these nations.  The Olympics are for heroes.  And Athens was no exception.

The Athens Games left none in doubt about sport entering the decisive stage of transition.  It also underlined the widening of the base with more and more talent flourishing in the remote cornets of the earth.  In the athletics competition its not just Americans picking medals but Costa Ricans, Ethiopians, Ecuadorians et al.  There were unexpected winners in other disciplines too particularly gymnastics and swimming.  The favourites were made to bite the dust while the unsung athletes finished with gold medals.  China in areas like table tennis, badminton, gymnastics where it made almost a clean sweep, established it as a major power with a pragmatic training programme.

Traditional powers suffered major defeats in the Olympics.  In no discipline was this more true than in football.  Iraq and Paraguay shocked what appeared to be unbeatable teams on the paper.  Boxing was another sport where the power equation shifted a bit with the Cubans and Americans finding it difficult to retain their hold.  Some judges had to be sent packing home for their errors in awarding points.  However, many are yet to come to grips with computer scoring, and some coaches felt this system which was introduced at the Atlanta Olympics had only complicated the whole exercise of awarding points.

A lot of us are complaining about India’s dismal performance at the Olympics.  But India’s performance at the Olympics was on predictable lines.  The exception being the elimination of the tennis duo Leander Bhupati and Anju Bobby George.  India won a silver medal from out of the blue.  The hockey team performed miserably.  It was hardly surprising that the knives were out among the players for German coach Gerhard Rach who was appointed at the eleventh hour after his predecessor Rajinder Singh was ignominiously sacked. Now everybody will pounce on him and come out with all sorts of theories, that he switched over to the robust European brand of hockey rather than sticking to play the traditional attacking Asian style.

But the fact is, if we are to come to the level of top teams like Holland and Australia we will have to adapt to that style of playing.  Things have to change.  Many leading hockey luminaries are of the opinion that India has to change. That India cannot hand on it for long and say it is our traditional style of play.  The Pakistan hockey team’s penalty corner specialist Sohail Abbas,  in his interview, had some words of wisdom for his Indian counterparts. When asked whether he was happy that Pakistan have once again beaten India, he said “not at all.”  “We were not here to beat India and be proud of it. It’s a shame that we cannot think beyond our rivalry.  I know people back home will be very happy that we have won against India.  But, actually, we are fooling ourselves.  If we have to be at the top we have to adapt to their style. We have lagged far behind the rest and it is now or never”. 

To another question on what he thought was going wrong.  Sohail Abbas said, “The first thing is that our players do not have “the country-comes-before-everything” attitude in them.  All the players may be individually great but as a team India and Pakistan are a scattered lot.  The camera is on you, so you dribble as much as you can and release it only when neither you nor your compatriot have a chance to push it further”.  He was full of high praise for their Dutch coach Roelant Oltmans who he said was simply excellent.  The coach made a lot of difference.  He thought them lot of things which they didn’t know or tried.  For the Europeans, defence means the forward line, that is their first line of defence.  In this context. India’s foreign coach should stay.

Now that we have fared miserably some drastic remedial steps should be forth-coming.  The first thing KPS Gill the long serving hockey Czar should resign.  No doubt Mr. Gill has done good work in other walks of life but authoritarians should go.  Apart from the physical fitness required at the top level, the players have even forgotten their basics like trapping.  Even a new follower of hockey who watched India play will admit it.  It was also amazing to note that the final results of all the five hockey matches played were decided in the last few minutes of the play.  The losses against Holland, Australia, New Zealand and the draw against Argentina.  Isn’t there a lesson to learn from this?

Just spare a thought.  If we perform so dismally in Olympic after Olympic, isn’t this reason enough to sack the people that run the Indian Olympic Association?  A cricket crazy India neglects and downplays the importance of other sports.   Both in school and at home, there is pressure on students who are good at sports to perform in academics.  Government  apathy adds to their woes.  The potential sportspersons go through immense hardship in the beginning of their career as it is not easy to get sponsors.  The practice of giving lakhs of rupees to sportsperson after they win medals needs to give way to supporting them while they are struggling to make it.  This way it will encourage and motivate the sportspersons.

In a nutshell, in 100 years of participating in the Olympics, we’ve won16 medals so far with only eight of them coming in the last 50 years.  Which means a country like China won these medals in a span of just five days in Athens.

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