Greetings to all who believe that having a sporting culture imbibed into the cultural ethos of this country(India) is the only way to true sporting glory.
True sporting glory?? This really needs to be defined first or at least some parameters need to be drawn. What better way than to cite examples with which we can relate to.
The Indian hockey team recently won the Sultan Azlan Shah Cup in Malaysia. It was a five team tournament with New Zealand(World no 7), Pakistan(World no 8), Egypt(World no 20) and the hosts Malaysia(World no 15) competing for the cup besides India(World no 11). Now, that is a sporting achievement. Sporting glory would only come when the Indian hockey team wins either the Olympic Gold, the Hockey World Cup or the Champions Trophy.
It would also be fair to say that in the unofficial national sport of cricket after the World Championship Win in 1985 in Australia where Ravi Shastri returned with the Champion of Champions accolade, there has been nothing to root for till date in the actual sport ,although much has been achieved on the administrative front with the creation of so many multi-millionaire cricketers and world class infrastructure. The test series victory against Steve Waugh's all conquering Australians after being blown off for more than half the series is the only other instance which comes to mind.
In a nut shell, in TEAM sports, true sporting glory can only be achieved by beating quality TEAMs.There are two essential ingredients in this. The opponent has to have quality and the result of the contest has to result in a WIN....very important from the sporting culture point of view as well- WIN (In India there is a tendency to glorify second place finishes, draws etc)
In individual sports it is even simpler. You simply have to WIN in an event which has the best in the world competing for the top spot. Vishwanathan Anand, Abhinav Bindra, Mary Kom, Pankaj Advani, Geeth Sethi, Michael Ferriera, Prakash Padukone, Pullela Gopichand, Dola & Rahul Bannerjee(apologies if any more world champions have been left out) are obviously miles ahead of the pack on that front, while Rajyavardhan Rathore, Sushil Kumar, Jitender Kumar, Karnan Malleswari and Leander Paes should also be given their due( ater all they WON olympic medals).
If we can all agree on the above, a little start I believe would have been made on my mission to bring about a sporting culture in this country...where we all play fair but play desperately to WIN
