Hindustan Times (Lucknow)

Wins, losses and longing in the Olympics season

“P(He lost the first set, he won’t win now); 28 years ago, my father, sitting in front of our Weston black-and-white TV, gave up hope. A tennis player from Kolkata, playing with a broken wrist at the Stone Mountain Center, was struggling. He had lost the first set. Watching a high-emotion sporting encounter with a strict dad was akin to walking the tightrope for a 90s kid. The outcome of the match dictated the subsequent harmony in the house. Giving up hope was the national hobby then. We had given it up a few months earlier, at Eden Gardens, when a teary-eyed Vinod Kambli walked back to the pavilion — and just a few weeks before the tennis match, when a newly-elected government fell within 13 days, calling for another costly election. Clearly, the hope supply chain was a bit broken.

Then, miraculous­ly, our player broke his much higher ranked opponent’s serve and won the second set. We were now a step closer to winning the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Tennis bronze match. Leander Paes, the son of an Olympics bronze medalist (hockey), soldiered on. “It was a blur,” he says today. But it must have been a blur that helped, as overthinki­ng and choking in the finals is another national hobby. No wonder, our social science books have chapters on athletes who ended up 4th at the Olympics. I mean no disrespect; they were the product of their impoverish­ed times. But this time, we won. A 100th-year special Olympic medallion. An individual medal. My father had never seen an individual Olympic medal in his lifetime. It took 44 years for the nation to see an Olympic medal gleaming around the neck of a sportspers­on who wasn’t holding a hockey stick. The nation was delirious. Our bronze age had begun. Paes’s win taught us how it felt to win an Olympic medal. An entire generation busy with inter-colony sports such as cricket, unaware of the joy of winning at a global event with more than ten nations participat­ing, suddenly wanted more. They had tasted blood.

The drought of the medals was such that even today when a player reaches an Olympic final, out of sheer post-traumatic stress syndrome, the headlines whisper a defeatist “PV Sindhu has assured a silver” headline, instead of deeming it a battle for the gold. That said, the times are changing. Our national pride has outrun our per capita numbers. Now, presidents of richer nations take selfies with our leader. We are called to their exclusive clubs. India’s Gross Domestic Product is growing fast. Even beggars have QR codes. The only inconvenie­nce is our denominato­r. Black-pillers tell you how some countries with the population of Dadar station at rush-hour have more gold medals than us. A singledigi­t tally isn’t good enough. Not befitting a Quad member. Deepika Kumari, an archery world champion, is openly criticised for not winning a medal. In a nation of mythologic­al archers such as Arjuna and Eklavya, how could we not win at archery, the internet jokes.

For many decades, such stuff was blasphemou­s. Now, such jokes are fine. Winning hearts is not enough. Now, these athletes aren’t objects of our sympathy or a guilt trip of a cricket-obsessed nation. No longer do stories of a resource-starved athlete sleeping in railway wagons during sporting trials and swimming in a crocodile-infested river just to reach school move us. That time is over. Now, we want medals. “Our medal tally should look like a six-digit OTP and not an ATM pin,” internet users post. But with higher expectatio­ns come greater disappoint­ments. As we grow old, we guard our emotions in a savings account rather than investing it around. We can’t afford mental downtime with all the commitment­s and responsibi­lities. Hence, a mundane sports defeat might not rankle much for a middle-aged person.

After all, the kids who saw the unravellin­g of the 120-chase in Barbados or the Kolkata 1996 semis or Sachin Tendulkar in that Chennai test — who barely ate their dinner on those days — are adults

now with dependents. More immune to such non-material damages. I still remember when MS Dhoni hit that winning six in the 2011 World Cup, I ran out to the 16th Main of BTM layout in Bengaluru, hugging absolute strangers and waving the flag. Did I do the same when India won the T20 WC this year? Not really. Maybe when I’ve kids old enough, I’ll partake. For now, there’s a brief lull. Such philosophi­cal musings are usually reserved for cricket.

The day an Olympic defeat has a similar shelf life of public despair, the day when we can actually criticise an erring athlete freely — that’s the day we show we actually care. Nothing shows we care more than actually being genuinely disappoint­ed. And that’s the day when we should bid for hosting the Olympics. Maybe, that year our medals tally will look like an OTP.