Break Point: Adding Insult to Victory

PT Usha’s experience shouldn’t surprise anyone. Hockey, chess and badminton champs have all been humiliated before.

PT Usha made her name leaping over hurdles. But she was helpless against the indifference of Indian sports officials in Bhopal recently. The organisers of the National Open Athletics meet put her up in a shoddy room. Usha was so hurt she wept. The tearful outburst before cameras might have been excessive, but her outrage was justified.

Inept officials are the hallmark of non-cricket Indian sport. Before the Usha episode, the glaring example of apathy towards athletes was a stormy night in 1998, when the Indian hockey team landed in Mumbai, having won the Asian Games gold after 32 years. The players were held up at the airport for three hours as there were no rooms. To be fair, Mumbai was an unscheduled stop. The team was to go to Delhi, but the flight had been diverted due to fog. Still, the players, many of them employed with Indian Airlines, expected a quicker, more enthusiastic response. “I will not let my son play hockey, not for India,” captain Dhanraj Pillay said.

Aparna Popat, winner of eight successive national badminton titles, says, “One year we were to fly to the US to compete in the World Championships. We got the visas so late that we barely reached on time. Ideally we should have gone a few days in advance and acclimatised.” Aparna says that being a leading player, she was at least spared the worst of the officials’ incompetence. Lesser players went through a harrowing time. Sometimes, the harassment was intentional. “They just do it to settle an old score,” says Aparna.  

Chess grandmaster Dibyendu Barua founded the Chess Players Association of India in 2004. The body often highlights the financial misdeeds of Indian chess administrators. In 2007, the players even forced the National ‘A’ tournament to be postponed because the lodging arrangements were unsatisfactory. “There are many participants in a tournament like the National ‘A’ and it is understandable if an organiser cannot make all of them happy,” says Barua. “But Usha was an individual. There is no reason why they should have made a mistake.”

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Akshay Sawai