The
opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Sochi will offer to the rest
of the world—by way of distraction, it is hoped, from gay rights protests—spangles and sequins and snow.
For
India, where the Winter Games usually fall somewhere between exotic and
alien, the ceremony will be watched with disbelief. Not for the
spectacle it will present, but the absence it will contain.
Three Indians will compete in Sochi
but India won’t. Not with an official contingent or any trappings like
people called “chefs de mission” and a busload of managers. Or, indeed,
even a flag.
The
three Indians will walk out at the Fisht Olympic Stadium’s parade of
athletes at the opening ceremony but not behind their tricolor, with its
striking blue wheel, inspired by an historical motif from more than
2,000 years ago. For the
duration of the games, the Indians will belong to a category called
“independent athletes” and compete and turn up everywhere under the
Olympic flag.
An “independent athlete”
is technically one who has qualified for the Olympics but whose
“nations have been dissolved or new nations have emerged due to
political transition, or international sanctions have left athletes
without a formal nation or NOC.”
The
first independent athletes formally turned up at the Olympics in 1992.
For some. their country was either being formed (Macedonia 1992 and East
Timor 2000) or like the Caribbean island of Netherlands Antilles, which
in 2010 did not exist as an independent nation any more. In 2012, a young Sudanese who had fled his country’s civil war competed at the London Olympics as an independent, as he was yet to be granted any passport.
Where
does India fit into all this? Sochi is the first time an Indian
contingent will take part in a mega event without the national flag. It
has come to this awful pass because of an ongoing tussle from over a
year ago between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the
Indian Olympic Association (IOA) over governance, regulations and
accountability. India has been suspended from the Olympic movement since December 2012 due to its failure to comply with the Olympic charter.
A pair of writers believe that
“a commitment effectively to bad ethics” by administrators heading
Indian Olympic sport had started what can only be called a mudslide.
The
specifics regarding India in Sochi come down to an absurdity: the date
for another round of IOA election (as ordered by the IOC) is now
scheduled for Feb. 9. Had the election been completed before Feb. 7, the
start of the Winter Olympics, an official Indian contingent could have
been fast tracked into Sochi. A previous IOA election had voted in a
president and a secretary general, who had been charge-sheeted on
grounds of corruption in two separate cases, in violation of the
international Olympic code which was India had always been aware of but
paid little attention to. (Both those men by the way, still turn up on
in their “official” designations on the IOA’s website.)
Despite
the start of the Sochi Olympics being a clear deadline, the election
was not brought forward because of a sudden, somewhat disingenuous devotion to due process. One
official was quoted as saying, “We have just three to five athletes who
qualify (for Winter Games). We can’t act in haste. We need to ensure
the proper process is followed.” A governance requirement by its own
international ruling body was dodged for months—but a random date on a
calendar was deemed sacrosanct.
Therein
lies a snapshot of the mindset of the administrators who govern Indian
Olympic sport and decades of their myopic vision and misplaced
objectives. The have ensured that the Indian athlete is very rarely
placed front and center in either policy or practice.
These officials belong to political parties across the entire ideological spectrum and have been successful shape shifters.
When asked by government to explain where taxpayers’ funds go, they cite “Olympic autonomy.”
When
asked by the IOC to amend their constitution in line with the Olympic
charter (including, not allowing charge-sheeted officials to contest
elections) they say government structures do not allow them to do so
follow these codes.
It
is the same bunch of people, in office for decades, who are in bitter
battle against the introduction of a radical sports bill in the Indian
parliament which seeks to put age limit for officials in sports bodies
and the number of years they can stand for and hold office.
The
Sochi episode has brought global attention to Indian sport’s biggest
failing, through the shortest, sharpest message possible–its athletes
without its flag.
Athletes
are solitary dreamers with individual, singular missions. Yet the sight
of their country’s flag at a mega event brings home to them—like dark
bold strokes off a thick paintbrush—their location in the larger picture
of the sporting worlds.
To
four-time Olympian ad Beijing gold medallist Abhinav Bindra, a quiet,
stoic, thoughtful young man, the sight of his national flag at a world
event contained in it, community, ownership, and his place in the sun.
At an Olympics, Bindra says, even before the opening ceremony, there is a
“welcoming ceremony” held for every arriving contingent at the Games
village. It has flag, anthem et al: “When that flag goes up along with
the others at the welcoming ceremony, it is the first sign you get that
you’re actually at an Olympics. It hits you.”
Former
India hockey captain Viren Rasquinha who competed in Athens 2004 calls
sighting the flag in pre-match ceremonies, his “goosebump moment.” And
“nothing—money, fame, success—nothing can ever match that.”
When
Bindra was awarded his gold at the flag-and-anthem ceremony in Beijing,
he said, “you feel something so deep in your being—at what has
happened, at what that moment means—it is tough to describe. You can
only feel it.” At the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou China, Bindra
remembers trap shooters from Kuwait (who
were also competing as independent athletes) after winning gold. As the
Kuwaitis watched the Olympic flag and the anthem play at the medal
ceremony, Bindra says, “Their jaws dropped, their faces fell. Without
their own flag, it was not the same thing.” One of them, Khaled Almudhaf
told the Associated Press, said, “It hurts, and I cried twice… I want to take the IOC flag off and hear my national anthem. My heart was a rock.”
When asked about Sochi, V.K. Malhotra, an Indian sports official, told the Outdoor Journal it
was “sad” that the contingent wouldn’t be carrying the flag at the
Winter Olympics. Malhotra, 82, and president of Indian archery for 40
years, is then reported to have said, “However, the Indian Winter
Olympic athletes don’t stand a chance of winning any medals either.” It
made Bindra mad. “That statement hurt me a lot. It showed the atmosphere
and the environment in Indian Olympic sport and how we treat our
athletes as second-grade.”