A Common Fan’s Sports Diary

The country is counting on you once again

The Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) has been worried for a long time the venues will not be completed in time for the 2010 games in Delhi. The organizing committee on the other hand have continued to promise everyone that the nothing of that sort will happen. The media also had chosen to ignore the matter for the longest possible time.

Now things have fallen so much behind schedule that the CGF president wants the prime minister’s intervention to speed up things. That’s just step away from asking for divine intervention.

The Organizing Committee are totally unruffled, however, coming out with yet another statement that Delhi will be ready at any cost.
The ball is now in the prime minister and the sports minister’s court. With the media having suddenly risen to the occasion, the ministers are definitely aware of the gravity of the situation. They can either play the autonomy card a la Mani Shankar Aiyer; claiming that government intervention will be tantamount to a violation of the IOC Charter (which says that sports bodies should be run autonomously) or they can save India from losing face in front of the entire world – something which will seriously dent our chances of hosting any major events in the future.

If no action is taken and the CGF takes the unprecedented step of moving the Games to Australia (which has already been placed on the stand bye) it will be more than the small matter of 12,000 crores going down the drain. These games are meant to showcase what modern India is all about – a country on the rise and on the move. Not being able to put it all together will highlight the exact opposite and jeopardize all our claims to being a new world power.

To the average Indian sports fan, it will hurt as much as the failure to qualify for the men’s hockey event of the last Olympics, if not more. There is so much at stake here.

The sports minister had sacked Indian Hockey Federation chief KPS Gill after the Beijing debacle. But the damage had already been done. So waiting for the present organizing committee to fail will be a calamitous mistake. The minsters need to pre-empt that and take some quick measures.

Disbanding the current one and getting a more professional and capable team will be a good place to start. A leaf can be taken out of the Athens 2004 example, when caught in similar situation, Greece averted a modern day Greek tragedy by getting the best man or shall we say woman to do the job. Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki was brought back to head the organizing committee and she re-energized the preparations ensuring a highly successful hosting of the games.

There is no shortage of capable people in this country who can handle an operation of this magnitude and save India’s blushes. The two ministers just need to put one in charge before its too late.

But do the two of them have the courage to take such a decision. Removing Suresh Kalmadi will not be easy. He is an influential member of parliament who belongs to the same party as the two ministers. It will be a public loss of face for him and he will fight tooth and nail, using all his political clout to scuttle such a move.

Manmohan Singh created a name for himself during the liberalisation process and during the nuclear deal. The fate of another important chapter in the history of modern India is now in his hands. Will he show the same conviction and do the right thing for the country or buckle under political considerations?

The entire country wants to know.

Related Article

What the Indian media isn’t telling you about the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games

This one really has me stumped. We have seen the media in England and Australia wage psychological battles against the visiting cricket teams including ones from India. The Indian media on the other hand pays foreign cricketers to write guest columns – ones which criticize our cricket and berate our players. And sometimes it helps these foreign players promote their books as well. I can understand the rationale of guest articles written by knowledgeable former players but cannot fathom the reason for ones written by the current ones.

Is there such an acute shortage of sports content in this country that we have to rely on these visiting players?

Or, are these newspapers still suffering from the ‘white man’ complex – letting these white cricketers preach us on the game?

As for getting the opposition’s side of the story, we don’t need that. That is all we get when we travel abroad. Is there no cricket patriotism amongst the newspaper people?

And if this wasn’t painful enough, now we have guest columns from our great sports administrators as well. Mr Suresh Kalmadi waxed eloquent on how the Delhi half – marathon was the perfect build-up for the Commonwealth Games. On one hand the media conveniently forgot to report the trouble the 2010 games are facing and on the other hand they give the culprits an opportunity for self –praise.

Don't be surprised if an Indian newspaper publishes a guest column by this guy soon

I wonder what could better this – a guest column from Osama Bin Laden perhaps

Will we have a successful Games?

Here’s an update on the state of preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

This comes courtesy of Richard Moore’s report in The Scotsman. It’s really a credit to the Indian media that we have to depend on a Scottish newspaper for updates on something that is happening in our country

Now for the update

The preparations for the Games are lagging seriously behind schedule – so much so that the Commonwealth Games Federation chief executive Mike Hooper has been spending half his time in New Delhi overseeing the work.

There is also talk that the Games could be in grave danger, with some even talking of the worst case scenario – that the games will be handed back to the last host, Melbourne – becoming a genuine possibility. That would really be a proud moment for Indian sport.

But are we exaggerating the issue. Preparation for such mega events have known to be behind schedule, most recently during the Athens Olympic Games.

The Delhi case, however, is a little different. This because the projected completion dates for most of the facilities is very aggressive in the first place, leaving very little breathing space.

Work began on the 58,000-seat main stadium last August and is scheduled to finish on 31 January 2010. The same completion date is given for the lawn bowls facility. The final touches to the facilities housing weightlifting, gymnastics, wrestling, shooting, table tennis, archery, squash, badminton, table tennis, tennis and swimming is set for a month earlier.

So what stage are these facilities in?

As per the official games website these facilities – all of them – still exist only as artists’ impressions.

And that is not all. It gets scarier

The “final design” is still being developed for the swimming pool, while the cycling velodrome appears to be at a “concept design” stage.

If you still aren’t worried, then either you don’t care about these games or have Alladin’s magic lamp lying at home.

Interestingly, at the recent Commonwealth Youth Games in Pune, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge, encouraged India to bid for the 2020 Olympic Games

He was either being sarcastic or is a very good diplomat