A Firm Believer

Most people get a hair job to prove that 50 is the new 30. Sailor Farokh Tarapore participates in his eighth Asian Games and wins a silver medal.

Most people get a hair job to prove that 50 is the new 30. Sailor Farokh Tarapore participates in his eighth Asian Games and wins a silver medal.

Tarapore is a man with his share of critics and has a tempestuous relationship with the Yachting Association of India (YAI). Conversations with both parties, even in the aftermath of the team’s medal-winning performance, bring out disputes and accusations. Nonetheless, once out on the water in Guangzhou, skipper Tarapore and teammates Atool Sinha, Shekhar Yadav, Trunal Helegaonkar and Balraj Singh put everything aside and finished a commendable second in the match racing category. There were Indian athletes who did better than that. But Tarapore’s age makes his performance special. For most, 50 is the evening of life. For some, evening is the new afternoon.

Tarapore does not claim to have changed the daily course of the sun. But he feels he has “lifted the lid for young sports people who think they are old”. The medal, he says, was special for another reason. “We were the second-ranked team in India and qualified for the Asian Games by defeating the No 1 team in the trials.” It was his answer to critics who might say that by extending his career, he was denying youngsters a chance.

“I can only laugh at the suggestion,” he says. “When I was younger, I did not want the stalwarts to retire, so that I could hammer them and prove myself.”
Ajay Narang, the YAI’s honorary joint secretary general, and Tarapore are not the best of friends. But even Narang says, “Some in the sailing community had lost faith in Tarapore’s abilities. But his team won the trials fair and square, and the silver medal is indeed an achievement.”

Match racing is not as obviously laborious as fleet racing. This is a discipline that calls for skill and experience more than stamina; the average skipper is in his mid-40s. The average age in fleet racing, on the other hand, is about 20. But it is demanding in its own way. Team members divide labour and use different body parts to navigate the boat through water and wind and past opponents. Match racing is a short format, described as the Twenty20 of sailing. But the workload is daunting. Each race is an intense 20 minutes. Tarapore & Co had to win 22 races over just four days to get the medal.

“Few other disciplines have such a long competition,” he says. “By the end, you are exhausted.”

We are meeting at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, an old-world idyll opposite the Gateway of India. It has a high ceiling, sailing regalia, photographs of seamen and a grey cat stretching and getting a rub from a waiter. When Tarapore arrives, he smiles and regrets the slight delay. He looks as if he is in his early 40s. A bony man, Tarapore’s waist is a quick lap to run for his Nautica belt. It goes into the buckle with a good number of holes to spare. His ears are pointy, reminding you of Mr Spock. And at the Asian Games, Tarapore became a rare case of a 50-year-old beaming himself up the podium.

He seems to fold into a chair, not sit, and jumps into the relevant subjects, castigating the YAI, speaking about his longevity and his beliefs. He has many of them. Many of his lines start with “I’m a firm believer in…” He is a firm believer in the phrase ‘firm believer.’ To use a favourite Indian campusism, Tarapore is a man who gives many ‘fundas’.

His favourite funda is the dream board. Every time he starts a mission, he writes his goal on a board.

“I’m a firm believer in the dream board,” Tarapore says. “In 2002, we were in Portugal for the World Championships. No one, but ourselves, believed we could win. We put it on the dream board. When we won and the press asked us about it, we told them, ‘We won it 15 days ago.’”

What does he typically write on the board? ‘I will be the world champion’?

“‘Will be’ is a bit escapist. ‘I am the world champion,’” Tarapore says. Fundas are now turning into theories, which too he has many of. These theories would be psychobabble, or lines on Nike T-shirts, if it had not been for his spectacular record. Tarapore has one gold, two silvers and two bronzes over eight Asian Games. He has also won many world championships and participated in three Olympics.

“The first principle of success is to lie to yourself,” Tarapore says. “For example, when you say you are a world champion when you are not a world champion, it’s a lie. But the first principle of success has no meaning without applying the second principle of success. Which is, never lie to yourself.” His eyebrows go up and he smiles, somewhat pleased with the smartness of his words. “Because if you said you were a world champion and then did it, the lie is undone. Keep lying till it becomes the truth. Is that making sense? It’s complicated. But if you think deep, it will make a lot of sense.”

What was the lie on his dream board this time?

“Asian Games 2010 gold medallist,” he says. “Missed it. But not by much.”

Asked if he envisaged competing and winning medals at 50, Tarapore says, “I did not. But every time I thought I had done enough and could stop, life became boring. An active sportsman works hard every day. When you retire, there is a void. Most people don’t know how to fill that void. I was a bit fortunate. Before the void happened, I put another dream before me. If you don’t have a dream, you are no different from a vegetable. Even a vegetable grows.”

Put that Taraporism on you T-shirt, son. And this too. “Put the goal in concrete, the plan in sand. If you’re not getting ahead with a particular plan, change the plan, don’t change the goal.”

And this. “Fourth place is the worst, because there are only three places on a podium. You will have to call a carpenter to make one more.”
Finally, “Sailing is 99.9 per cent mental, 0.01 per cent physical. And even of that, 99 per cent is mental.”

Where do you get these fundas, Farokh?

“It’s what I have learnt from 40 years of sailing,” he says. It’s what he has learnt from the many books he has read on the subject that has interested him since childhood—not boats, not the sea, but success.

Asked if he’s a dyed-in-the-wool seaman who loves the water, Tarapore says, “I was born in a small fishing village called Satpati, so the water never held any fear for me. But it is not that I was fascinated by the water or the sea or the wind. I was fascinated with success. I read one book a month. As a rule. The book is always about some success principle. I like to read success stories. People who are successful have clarity of thought. You can immediately tell when someone is gassing, or when someone is clear in the head.”

In order to extend his career, Tarapore had to forsake what is dear to every professional past his prime—the crutch of pension. The subject reveals the outspoken side of Tarapore’s personality and his problems with the YAI, which he says is “full of people with no passion for the sport and no idea how to take it forward”.

“In 1994, the sports ministry was looking for Asian Games gold medallists to start their monthly pension scheme and I was one of them,” he says about a situation most would be happy to be in. Under the scheme, if an athlete was over 30 and ‘meritorious’, he was entitled to a pension, the amount depending upon the level of achievement. It was not mandatory for the athlete to have retired. In 2008, however, a retirement clause was introduced. In August 2009, Tarapore was told that if he was receiving pension, he could not compete in international events. He got Rs 1,500 a month when the scheme began. By 2009, it had gone up to Rs 7,000 a month.

“The YAI used the retirement clause to finger me,” he says. “I told the YAI that I had not asked for the pension. I told them that the original pension scheme had no retirement clause. I could have gone to court, but that would have meant not participating in the Asian Games. An amount of Rs 7,000 is not worth losing your freedom. Finally, I told them that I was ready for forgo the pension. Quite shamelessly, they stopped my pension.”

The YAI’s Narang, however, says that the pension did not just fall in Tarapore’s lap. He had applied for it. Narang also feels that Tarapore’s outrage over the new retirement clause is illogical. “How can you claim pension and not be retired?” he says, amused. “Also, how is it the YAI’s fault if the ministry introduced the clause?”

To illustrate his stand that Tarapore applied for pension, Narang sends Open a copy of an application form signed by Tarapore. But it is dated 1997. This was an application Tarapore had made for another incentive, after his 1991 World Championship win.

“Narang sent you the World Championship form probably trying to pass it off as an application for the original Asian Games pension scheme in 1994,” Tarapore says. “One fine day, I got 12 cheques of Rs 1,500 each and that is how I found out I was in the scheme.”

Contradictory versions also emerge over the subject of David Atkinson, the coach appointed by the YAI for the Asian Games campaign. Tarapore was not happy with Atkinson, claiming he was not just an inferior coach but also frequently indisposed and expensive. He says he had recommended coaches who were better and cheaper to the YAI.

In response, Narang says, “We get government funding and we have to spend it wisely. Atkinson cost us £5,500 a month. The coach Farokh wanted demanded €385 a day, which comes to more than €10,000 a month. He also had other demands. And while it is true that Atkinson got sick at the Asian Games, he was on hand when the team prepared for the event with stints in India and abroad.”

Back to Tarapore in this comedy of disputes. He says, “What the YAI conveniently left out was that Atkinson was hired for four months. That means, in all he was paid £22,000, plus other expenses. The coach I had suggested was meant to be hired for 30 days over a period of six months at €350 a day. Which amount is smaller?”

Let the Indian yachting authorities decide who is right and who is wrong. What is clear to us is that it could not have been pleasant. But Tarapore believes the key to longevity in sports lies in the ability to overcome adversities of various kinds. “The most important thing with longevity is, how you deal with the bad times,” he says. “Anyone can deal with a medal. The whole world is with you. Everybody was your coach. When you lose, you lose alone. I have had several low points. People look at the five Asian Games medals, the World Championship wins in different classes of boats. They don’t see the times you could have died on water, the many times you lost. But you have to have the courage to get up just once again.”

Tarapore says, yachting is not a dangerous sport. “But people have died,” he says. “For instance, you can die of hypothermia if your boat capsizes in cold water and you are not picked up soon enough.”

Once he had made up his mind to go for the medal again, Tarapore had to prepare his body. He says he owes a lot to health supplements.

“My expense on supplementation is Rs 10,000 a month,” he says. “Supplementation reduces the gap between what I eat and my nutritional requirements. It gives me vitamins, calcium, makes up for the fruits and vegetables I might not always consume. It helps me maintain my bones, the lubrication in the joints, everything. I got conscious of it in the last decade-and-a- half. When you are 20 or 30, you are a rock.”

Finally, one dares to asks him if there are mad Bawa elements to his personality. He says, “If someone has done eight Asian Games, whether it is a normal Bawa or a mad Bawa, you’ve got to judge for yourself.”

Asian Games 2010Farokh TaraporeYachting Association of IndiaYAI