Results in Sports a Direct Outcome of Priorities

  Kavita Raut became the fourth Indian lady to qualify for Rio 2016 in the Marathon!

An Olympic Year pushes you to write more. The buzz among the global sporting fraternity is so palpable! There is so much happening all around in the build-up- athletes are qualifying, getting banned, injured et. all. And you sometimes want to just let go and dive headlong into capturing all those moments, those 'stars in the making' and all those stories of extreme human ambition, dejection and perseverance against all odds.

News just came in that an Indian runner Kavita Raut has qualified for the Rio Olympics making her the fourth Indian woman to do so. She beat the qualifying mark by more than two secs....but the marathon has maximum participation among all Games events and qualifying standards are therefore kept pretty lenient. In another unrelated development New Zealand's World#1 Ranked Woman Golfer Lydia Ko has said that the Olympics will be her top priority this year. Reinforces the stature of the Games even among hard-core individual professional sportsmen and women.

Back home Indian athletes including Olympic hopefuls are busy grinding it out at the South Asian Games. The twelfth edition being played in the cities of Guwahati and Shillong. People in the know and well-wishers of Olympic sports in the country, including several high ranking federation officials associated with sports for a long time, have raised concerns around this disrupting preparation schedules in an Olympic year. In fact, causing more harm to them as sparring with well below par competition has its ill-effects....or so they say.

But we have taken an oath to be positive haven't we? And the way to look at it, is that it might just instill more confidence, get them into a winning habit and so on. Time will tell. However, what agonizes the sports fan no-end is why cannot the authorities be more pragmatic in an Olympic year? Would the results have been anymore different if the top Olympic hopefuls were allowed to give the event a miss? What makes a Sports Minister energize all his efforts into himself organizing and pulling no stops to ensure that a nondescript regional sporting event gets more attention than Olympic preparations? Can you imagine a Sports Minister of a country missing from the country's sporting base for months on end, with less than a year to go for the Olympics to begin?

Results are often a direct outcome of priorities. Lydia Ko's priorities are crystal clear. You will see that her results will follow as well- GK's Call!

We can only hope that ours are in the right place as well.

Six Months to Rio, Six the Benchmark!

Its six months to the day for the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games to kick-off and till date about 61 Indians have attained the qualifying standards to compete in them. There will be a few more after pending qualifiers of some sports are concluded. The final qualification opportunity for Asian shooters concluded this week by the way right here in New Delhi, It was heartening to see some sports loving nations like Singapore and Malaysia win their first ever quotas in the sport for Rio right here in India's capital city. The toil and tears which go into such massive human efforts is often missed by the mass-media in general, overeager and rightly so, to project successes closer home. India added four more Rio quotas to their existing eight to ensure a record participation of the sport in all Olympics and if performances of the last four years are anything to go by, then shooting should once again return as the country's most successful sport from the games. However we should have done more in Shooting and the 3-4 'near miss quotas' could come back to hurt us really hard at the end of the games. Read on to find out why.

The problem this time is that the benchmark is Six medals! Are we confident enough to surpass the mark which every nation progressing in the right direction should aspire to do as a bare minimum? This space a while before the London Games had emphatically stressed on Six medals as a certainty.! This time there is nothing that makes us overtly optimistic....even of touching that mark, leave alone bypassing it. Why?

By and large over the last four years if you have followed this space, you would find that the Olympic sports that have performed at a top international level for India continue to be the ones which were already an area of strength in the last games. Archery, Badminton, Boxing,Shooting, Tennis and Wrestling. The worry is that over the past four years in Archery, Boxing and Wrestling we have kinda stagnated as far as top international results are concerned, instead of being on an upswing. Combined we probably have four quality athletes ranked in the lower top 10s of the world across the 35 odd competition categories which will give away medals at the Olympics.

Shiva Thapa is perhaps the highest ranked at number two in his boxing weight category and Deepika Kumari and Mary Kom are probably the other significant names on that list but they have either remained at same performance levels or have gone down with age. To expect three medals from the above three disciplines would be being too optimistic given that the world is too young and fast nowadays to wait for athletes past their prime to to make lasting mark. Unless of course if you are an Usain Bolt! That leaves you with Shooting, Tennis and Badminton. Shooting has the potential to be a game changer for this trio if lady luck goes India's way at Rio and these three disciplines alone can then help us surpass the London mark or at least touch it. At their best your shooters can give you four medals, Shuttlers two and Tennis one to easily go past London. And then anything else we get will be a bonus:))

Golf is the other sport where we would be sending a quality side and have been doing really well at the top level in recent times. However its a debut for the sport and all the top guns of the world will be giving it their all so it would be very harsh to expect a medal out of the sport. Anirban Lahiri and SSP Chawrasia should make it on present form and rankings.

GK's Call!
And I know its a shame and it continues to be for decades now but we should not be expecting any medals at all from the Men's and Women's hockey team who have also qualified for Rio.-GK's Call!

If I were to be negative and add my personal experience to it, I would have to say that it is really sad that our internal political equations come in the way of progress of Olympic sports in this country....and so it is in any walk of life here. Here is hoping and continuing to hope that we reach double figures at least at Tokyo 2020! At the very least if we have any dignity left as a nation!-GK's Agony!

The way to look at it is obviously being positive. What we do have in the forthcoming games is Quality Olympic experience of winning medals. Abhinav Bindra, Gagan Narang, Saina Nehwal, Mary Kom, Yogeshwar Dutt and most probably Sushil Kumar give you that comforting company which previous Indian Olympic squads were deprived of. We need to cash in on this, hope that their presence energizes everyone to give off their best and that is our best chance to come back with our best ever performance from Rio!