Yes, They Could Have

We tried leveraging genetics to aim for Olympic medals, but politics and pettiness ruined the plan

In 1984, Carl Lewis achieved one of sports’ Homeric feats. He became the first man since Jesse Owens in 1936 to win four track and field gold medals in a single Olympic competition. Like Owens, Lewis was of African lineage. His stellar career, which stretched all the way to the 1996 games and fetched nine Olympic golds, once again proved that African-Americans were the limb and soul of track and field.

Miles away, the SAI (Sports Authority of India) took notice. It started the SAG (Special Area Games) project. It identified tribals in the northeast and western regions of India, and the Siddi tribe, which is spread out in parts of Karnataka and Gujarat. Those from the north-east were selected and trained in archery and weightlifting.

The Siddis, being of African descent and whose ancestors came to India centuries ago as slaves and soldiers of ambitious kings, were chosen for athletics. But the unique experiment ended abruptly. The reason, as usual, was the politics and pettiness in Indian sport.

Diog Siddi, a clan elder, remembers the first selection trial of 1987. Little Siddi kids ran with skill and joy. Sports officials huffed and puffed after them to jot down their names. “They were running freely,” Diog says. “There was no doubt that they could have been groomed for the big stage.”

Margaret Alva, the Union minister of state for sports then, who was the brain behind this programme, put a dedicated team in place to groom local talent by providing modern training. She says, “We chose the best of talent. Soon, these trainees started dominating their sport. I remember we had decided to train gymnasts from Kerala’s circus families, rowers from Andamans, Siddis in athletics. An astroturf [field] for hockey came up in Ranchi around that time, even as I personally went around the akharas of Haryana and Punjab discussing with wrestling gurus how to modernise the sport and raise the performance bar at the international level.”

But then it was too ambitious a dream in a country where pettiness somehow triumphs in the end. An SAI coach who had seen the Siddis at close quarters, says, “The build and determination of the Siddis made them medal prospects. Had the programme continued, they would have made a mark at the international level.”

Doordarshan commissioned a documentary on the Siddis. It was anchored by Tom Alter. “The documentary was shot when we were running for the trials. Fifty of us were selected and sent to New Delhi and Bangalore for further training,’’ recalls 35-year-old Louis Vincent Briji Siddi, an affable and well-built athlete who was selected for the first batch in 1987. “We learnt what shoes were. Coaches had to teach us how to differentiate between the left and right shoe.” Louis is now working with South Western Railway as an office superintendent in Hubli.

The programme gained momentum. One of the trainers, Coach Ravanan, produced results in a short span of time. “Most of us rewrote existing records at the junior level,” says Louis, a long jumper and triple jumper. This did not go down well with other athletes. They could not stomach competition from strange-looking people.’’ He says this with a grin.

Slowly, the internal politics of various sporting bodies began to affect the Siddis. The situation worsened when the highly regarded coach Ravanan died in a train accident. “After the death of Ravanan sir, we had no supporters,” says Kamala Siddi, once the poster girl of the SAG project. She competed in Australia and the United States, among other premier international venues. Now, in her modest railway quarters in Hubli, she clutches the handful of international medals she once won and looks back on a revolution that started well but did not end happily.

“In 1992, we were all shifted to the new SAI campus on the outskirts of Bangalore,” says the Railway employee who was earlier with Karnataka Police. “Our Rs 200 per month stipend was reduced to Rs 50. It was not enough to buy even soaps and antiseptics.”

After the shift to SAI campus, some athletes were on the verge of breaking into the senior team. “It caused problems. Coaches and administrators could not accommodate their favourites,’’ Kamala says. As Siddis were dropped from camps and international tournaments, a sense of disillusionment set in. Some like Kamala, however, stayed on and did reasonably well.

“Though I was dropped from the relay squad at the last minute for the 1992 Olympics, I kept training hard,’’ says Kamala. It paid off. In 1994, at the World Police Games, Melbourne, she won a gold, two silvers and a bronze in the 4×100 relay, 100m hurdles, high jump and the 4×400 relay, respectively. She participated in two South Asian Federation Games in Dhaka, 1993, and in Chennai, 1995. In Dhaka, she managed only a bronze in the 100m hurdles. In Chennai, she got a silver. She was among the few selected for a 75-day training stint in the US. Other athletes returned to their tribal hamlets. Some stayed back in Bangalore and got jobs with the Karnataka Police, Railways, Border Security Force, the Army’s MEG regiment and Punjab Police.

The living room of Kamala’s house has several photographs that capture her athletic prime. One stands out. It is a photograph of her sprinting over a hurdle at the World Police Games, determined to outrace her opponent on the inside left. Nimiksha, Kamala’s three-year-old, is joined by her sister, five-year-old Prateeksha. The two wear their mother’s medals around their necks. Their father, Mingel Saver Siddi, has a sporting past too. He was a heptathlon and 110m hurdle champ.

Diog Siddi, a self-styled do-gooder of the Siddi community which has some 30,000 members, has been writing to various departments and governments to restart the SAG project. His letters never get a reply.

Kamala and Louis are keen on helping Siddi children go farther than they did. There is talent aplenty. If at all there are doubts over the physical aptitude of the tribe, little Joel erases them by lifting a bicycle.

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