What I Saw at the Games

For all the administrative bungling, the brazenness of smug officials, the stench of greed that surrounded the Games, it had its moments

A middle-aged Delhi woman in salwar-kameez and sports shoes doesn’t need a name. She is Mummyji. That is what we will call her.

So the other day at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, a little away from discarded giant puppets and tables used for the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, Mummyji was watching on a big screen a table tennis match taking place at the Yamuna Sports Complex. India’s Soumyadeep Roy was playing South Africa’s Shane Overmeyer in the team championship. In the gripping final stages of the match, Soumyadeep missed a serve. Mummyji, watching the match with the rest of her family, her fists clenched, threw her head back in agony.

Remember this moment. Mummyji in anguish. Because this does not happen often in India. Not at table tennis matches.

If the photographs of filthy toilets and bedsheets captured everything that was wrong with the Commonwealth Games — and there was a lot that was wrong — the intense involvement of Mummyji in a table tennis match was a reminder of the redeeming bits about the Games. They got a response from the public. The interest was not of the scale seen in cricket. But it was much better than expected. Few thought Delhi, or India, would care about an archaic competition suspended, in terms of its identity, somewhere between the Olympics and Asian Games. In the middle of India-Australia cricket, Facebook and television, butter chicken dinners and studies, how many people would have the time or enthusiasm to watch athletes who were not even all top-drawer? Especially when watching them involved long walks from stadium drop-off points? But people came in good numbers. Some may have received free tickets. But one also saw many spending their own money. And when tickets were not available, their disappointment was genuine.

“Maybe I will go home and play something instead,” said Sagar Singhal, 10, in a dusty ground near the Siri Fort Sports Complex, the badminton venue. He wanted to watch the team finals between India and Malaysia, featuring Saina Nehwal. The friendly but helpless ticket booth attendants, their Haier air conditioners set at 20º Celsius, told Sagar’s guardian that all tickets had been sold out. A lot of people got the same answer that day, an answer they simply could not believe.

“The stadiums have empty seats, but there are no tickets. How can this be?” This was the puzzle everyone at the ground near the Siri Fort auditorium was trying to solve. It was seven in the evening. In the insufficient light of the few tube-lights around, people scratched their chins, squatted on the ground at the injustice, or just laughed. Some were on mobile phones, communicating their disappointment or anger to friends or family. They somehow felt cheated.

Supong Longcharn, a political science student and badminton player from Nagaland, was furious, though he maintained an outward calm. He had been sold the wrong ticket. “I specifically asked them for tickets for the semifinals and finals,” Supong said. “I went to the venue for the final, all excited. But they told me my ticket was for the bronze medal play-off.”

An English couple, Trevor and Julie Grant, were among those at the ground, not knowing what exactly to do. Their son, Adrian, was in the English squash team. They had heard from him that there were few people in the stands. But the guys at the ticket booth, in their red and white uniforms, insisted that they had no tickets.

Trevor Grant maintained his sense of humour. Taking down his name, one asked, “Grant as in Cary Grant?” He replied, “Yes. But no relation.” Julie Grant too was a pleasant woman. They were rather relaxed for a couple that had decided on a whim to fly from London to Delhi and soon upon landing had been involved in a taxi accident.

Julie Grant said, “We were tired of the negative media coverage of the Games back home. We wanted to support the Games.” But she could not help wishing a few things were in place.

She said, “There is no one you can ask for directions to venues, everyone just points in a general direction. In Australia (CWG 2006), if you got on a bus, you could be certain it would take you to the right venue.”

This is what happens with things as large as the Commonwealth Games. You have experiences that are good and bad. The mood is upbeat at one level, gloomy at another. Like other large things. Like the Titanic. On the night of 14 April 1912, some sections of the ship had little idea of the catastrophe unfolding at the other end. At Mummyji’s surface level, the Games were fun. Despite everything. At deeper levels, where the heavyweights of sport, international relations and finance operated, the Games were a failure.

A few days into the competition, delegates and athletes broke their dignified silence. “We were treated like cattle, it was disgraceful,” said Steve Moneghetti, Australia’s chef de mission, to a South African newspaper. English world champion swimmer Gemma Spofforth said, “There are a lot of people from other countries who are not sure if they want to be here. There are people who are fed up and just want to go home. I’m not sure it is completely to do with people falling ill. I think it is just the atmosphere.”

The atmosphere, however, was just fine for the nearly 3,000 people at the RK Khanna tennis stadium the day of the women’s singles semifinals. Sania Mirza, in a bubblegum pink outfit on a court the blue of washing soap, lost the first set to Olivia Rogowska of Australia despite the crowd support and proximate presence of husband Shoaib Malik, dressed in black T-shirt and jeans. Rogowska smacked winners past Sania at will. The crowd, however, did not lose hope. “Make India proud,” someone said. “This one for Shoaib,” said another. When someone shouted “Control your emotions,” someone else shouted back, “Or this guy will get loose motions.”

Sania changed her gameplan, took the pace off the ball. Denied a hitting rhythm, the young Aussie started to wither. The crowd did the rest.

When Sania scored a fighting win, the full house gave her their heart. Grown-up Indian men, with silly grins on their faces and poor running actions, rushed to her with autograph books and mobile phones. Sania milked the rare victory in front of a full house for all its worth. After lofting four balls to different parts of the stands, she carried one to a baby at courtside. One teenaged boy got her towel, white and sweaty. He held it aloft like a world boxing championship belt.

Alpesh Gandhi and Amit and Piyush Ladah, boys in their 20s, were making a brief stopover in Delhi on their way to Vaishnodevi. They had made up their minds to watch the tennis. Their trip was worth it. As Sania came closer to victory, an excited Alpesh called up his friend, saying, “Sania nu match,” and gave him directions to follow it on television.

Amit Ladah from Delhi, whose knowledge of sports was impressive, felt the Commonwealth Games were a success. “The media was too negative,” he said. He was even ready to forgive Suresh Kalmadi. But an elderly lady with a clipped accent, sitting right behind him, said, “I won’t forgive him. Or Sheila.” She was having a good time, though.

At the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium too the mood was upbeat one day, the day of the 100 metres’ sprint. All age groups were present. For different reasons. “Where is Shera sitting?” a girl toddler asked her parents after Shera appeared on the screen, his body crouched and finger to his lips, requesting silence for the start of the 100 metres.

The first sight of the Nehru stadium as you walk in will stop you in your tracks. With sports arenas and monuments, photographs rarely do justice. It looked dazzling. Floodlights along its rim and roof, providing 2,200 lux illumination, sparkled like diamonds. The stadium looked cut off from the outside world, a nocturnal planet humming to its own rhythms. Outside concerns did not penetrate this bubble.

Wherever you looked, there was something interesting on. One corner hosted the decathlon. On the rust-coloured, nine-lane Conica synthetic running track, sprints were taking place. As the evening progressed, a good number of the blue seats had been taken. There were some 25,000 spectators, not a bad figure by Indian standards. Those 25,000 realised that 100m is not as short a distance as it seems on television. So there was great appreciation for parasport athletes. Many of them ran at blistering speeds despite having only stubs for arms, or similar disadvantages. England’s Katrina Hart, a cerebral palsy patient, won the women’s 100m in 14.36 seconds. Simon Patmore won the men’s. Samkelo Mike Radebe of South Africa took the silver. The crowd roared when he did something uncommon, somersaulting on the podium before receiving his silver medal. Also popular was the women’s 100m champion, Australia’s Sally Pearson. As Down Under, the all-time hit from Aussie group Men at Work, thumped out of the audio system, Pearson ran a victory lap, preening, embracing the galleries, with the Australian flag wrapped around her. But her joy was to be shortlived.

Outside the stadium, a little away from the festively lit Metro station terminal, an old American man with a shaven head was dancing and chanting “Hare Rama Hare Krishna.” Wearing a yellow kurta with cow drawings, he identified himself as Bhakta Avatar Das from Iskcon in Vrindavan.

“It’s nice to see all these people,” he said. “I’m here chanting ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’ because it purifies your soul.” He said he was from California and spent six months a year in India. He loved sports. “Baseball, tennis, surfing…” He was part of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi’s group. Naturally, The Beatles were mentioned. Then it was back to Rama and Krishna, the Fab Two of Indian mythology.

Further down the road, a satisfied looking SK Sethi, accompanied by his son of about nine, said, “This was a new experience for us.”

But something characteristically controversial had happened in the arena. Sally Pearson, the 100m darling, had been disqualified. England, a bitter rival of Australia, appealed that Pearson had false-started. It had gone unnoticed all this while. Now, suddenly Pearson was no longer the gold medalist. Nigeria’s Damola Osayomi had taken her place.

The shocking condition of the toilets in the athletes’ village and Mummyji despairing over a missed table tennis serve were two distinct snapshots of the Games. The generous public applause for Pearson and her subsequent disqualification presented a synopsis of the Games. The essence of Delhi 2010 was that the farcical, the controversial and the encouraging were never far from each other. On one hand, there were the crowds, and India did creditably. In that sense, the Games were a success. On the other, the organisation was woeful. India’s humiliation as a host was complete. In that sense, the Games failed.

Several days into the event, insiders found hard to believe Organising Committee (OC) Chairman Suresh Kalmadi’s utter disregard for deadlines or criticism, or even his profligacy.

“Kalmadi’s stock answer to reminders about impending jobs was ‘ho jaayega’,” says an OC employee. “Someone lost her patience one day and put up a banner on her desk, ‘Commonwealth Games 2010. Ho Jayega.’”

Kalmadi was in denial, it seems, even the day a bridge near the Nehru stadium collapsed. In a meeting at the OC, he proclaimed, “We can start the Games in one hour if we have to.” An employee of a sports federation muttered, “Ab toh chup karo (shut up at least now).”

What was appearing in the media all the while did not matter to Kalmadi, not as much as journalists believed it would. “The media exaggerates its importance,” one staffer said. “No one cares what they write. The life of a story in an OC office was three hours. By afternoon, it was forgotten. Kalmadi and his gang knew the Games would not be cancelled. Anything else did not matter to them.”

There are many more stories in which OC bosses alternate between roles of hubristic emperors and court jesters. His flamboyance uncompromised, Kalmadi would drive around in a Lexus. The OC ordered 18 LED television sets for its premises. Lalit Bhanot, the OC secretary general, played the joker. When asked about South African swimmer Roland Schoeman calling Indian spectators “monkeys”, Bhanot said, “There are monkeys in that area and we are trying to get them out of there.” He thought there were real monkeys at the swimming pool. Mike Fennell, the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) chief, and Mike Hooper, the federation CEO, were sitting beside Bhanot. They could barely control themselves.

However, to think that thick-skinned administrators will stop bidding for events will be to underestimate Indian greed. In a tone that is impressively even, which does not bow to the overriding sentiment of the hour, a Commonwealth Games employee with an MBA from the UK, says, “We have very good infrastructure. You cannot deny that. Next year, Delhi will host the Champions Trophy hockey. There are top events lined up in badminton and squash. Gradually, the world will accept us as a host.”

That said, Kalmadi’s foolish Olympic fixation might thankfully go unfulfilled. Despite the few positives of the CWG, too much has gone wrong organisationally for international bodies to risk awarding prestigious events to India. Of late, the Indian Government too has stopped the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) from taking on assignments and further embarrassing the country.

Not knowing whether to be happy or sad, one heads to the Major Dhyan Chand hockey stadium to watch India play Pakistan. India win 7-4. The crowd is delirious. Sonia Gandhi moves. And expresses more in one hour than she normally does in a year. This is that happy end of the Titanic. Outside, one sees Bhakta Avatar Das again. This time, a few Namdhari Sikhs, in white clothes and white turbans, have joined his jig. They do the bhangra, while the grey-eyed Californian chants and sways. It is a party alright. One hopes Rama and Krishna have the power to purify the souls of Kalmadi and his team.

About The Author

Akshay Sawai