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When Akhil Kumar walks into the ring, he looks right:the clothes, the shoes, the equipment is like any other competitor’s. What is his own is the swagger, the swagger of a man who is confident almost to the point of being cocky.
On Friday, though, the man who walked in behind him had an even bigger attitude as he came rushing in as if in a hurry to finish the fight. Perhaps this was justified: after all, the man in red, the Rusian Sergey Vodopyanov was the ruling world champion, and you don’t get there by being apologetic.
In total contrast to Akhil Kumar were the two Indian women standing at the starting line for the 200 metres with some of the world’s leading women heptathletes. They didn’t belong here; that was obvious.
Their clothes were wrong: loose top, loose shorts, both covering their bodies quite unlike the other women who stood there in their barely-there outfits. Okay, you wanted to say, Indian women may not be comfortable with skin-hugging, near-bikini attire, but surely a more modest outfit could have been devised which was not as frumpy and fitted their bodies better, so that the athletes at least looked right. To look the part is half the battle won.
That, of course, isn’t all. There is the question of what is inside the clothes, shabby or otherwise, and there’s the question of what is above the clothes, shoulders up. The other women had bodies that were sculpted to perfection; our women’s bodies were works in progress, with still a very long way to go. As for the attitude, you could tell that the two Indian girls, Sushmita Singh Roy and Pramila Ganapathy, were beaten before they started. As it happens, they finished seventh and eighth, in a field of eight.
Abhinav Bindra has shown that it isn’t necessary for a sportsman to conduct himself aggressively to become a champion. To take an example from our most popular game, a player like Yuvraj Singh will walk in like a gladiator, but that doesn’t make him a betterplayer than Sachin Tendulkar who saunters in without any undue show of aggression. In one of his post-victory interviews, Bindra put it rather neatly. “Earlier,” he said, “when we walked into a championship, we were so conscious of the way the Europeans walked in, their confidence and their arrogance. Now we feel they are just like us.”
That change of mindset which enables you to look at the other competitors as equals is the difference between winning and losing, sometimes even in the two extremes of striking gold and coming last in the heats. To give another example from cricket, the Indian cricket teams of the 1950s, thought they contained players like Vijay Hazare and Vinoo Mankad —equal to the world’s best — fared dismally, especially when they were away from the security of home grounds.
Perhaps this has to do with the fact that most of the players had spent a large part of their lives in pre-Independence India and the colonial hangover took time to disappear. Our cricket team now may not always beat its opponents, but those are the ups and downs of any game. What’s important is that no other team, including the Big Bully Australians, intimidate them.
Kumar and Bindra aren’t the only Indians at the Olympics who share this change of attitude. So do Leander Paes and Saina Nehwal. And so do many of the shooters and archers who may not have done so well at Beijing, but have won medals at other international and world championship events.
Which is why I wouldn’t wring my hands at our final medals tally, whatever it may be.Abhinav Bindra, Akhil Kumar and Saina Nehwal represent a new kind of Indian sportsperson, confident, self-assured, aggressive even. It’s because of them that Beijing marks a watershed for Indian athletes, a turning point which augurs well for the future.