A Common Fan’s Sports Diary

Is this really great news for Archery?

The Hindu carries an interesting story, about, how in the wake of Abhinav Bindra’s Beijing success, the Olympic Champion’s sport has become a favourite amongst school children. Enthusiasm for this sport has reached such levels that the Navodaya Vidyalaya at Bagalur near Bangalore has raised an entire high school team. This team has brought great glory to the school.

This is great.

A sport other than cricket is becoming popular amongst shcools and students. Also that a top daily is covering this development.

But wait

The sport which these school children are falling in love with is Archery and not shooting. The article talks about the resounding success of Indian archer Abhinav Bindra at the Beijing Olympics.

There are two possibilities

One is that, the children’s taking up archery and doing well in it has nothing to do with Abhinav Bindra. The connection is the imagination of a poorly informed reporter and an equally poorly informed editor desperatley looking for a great story. So rather than appearing to be concerned about other sports, the paper ends up looking poorly informed about other sports.

The other rather unlikely possibility is that there is indeed a conncection. That someone told the children a lie about Bindra being an Olympic champion archer to enourage them to take up the sport. They ended up doing that and doing really well at it. In that case, however, the story should have been different. It should have been about Bindra the shooting champion inspiring children to take up differnet Olympic sports like archery.

But the story mentions Bindra the archer.

Is it possible that the reporter was also tricked by the lie which fooled the children

That reporters as naïve as small children do sports reporting says a lot about how much importance the media gives to non-cricket sports in this country

Thanks to Nimish for breaking this story

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