Indian Olympic Association’s insensitiveness towards athletes unfair

Now that shooter Abhinav Bindra has also been named goodwill ambassador, furore over Salman Khan being seen as the sole appointee of the Indian Olympic Association for generating interest in the Rio Games will blow over. But the IOA has not come out of the incident smelling of roses.

By all accounts, the decision to invite Beijing gold medallist Bindra (along with cricket maestro Sachin Tendulkar and music composer A.R. Rahman, who hadn’t responded till the time of writing this piece) looks a belated attempt at damage control.

Salman Khan, of course, can hardly be faulted for agreeing to the proposal. Several film stars follow sport passionately and there would be any number willing to push the IOA’s agenda of creating sports awareness in the country. The Khan family particularly is known to be sports obsessed.

The intention to spread the gospel of sport is laudable, and I think choosing a film star for this — give the vast audiences they command — is not misplaced.

But I would have preferred this was done on a prolonged basis and targeting the young age groups rather than in an ad hoc manner, just before the biggest sports event in the world.

The IOA argues that it had always intended to have several ambassadors, not just Salman Khan. Even if this is true, it begs the question why it was not made clear at the outset as this would have ensured that an interesting proposal wouldn’t degenerate into a controversy.

Some Indian sportspersons — notably Milkha Singh, Ashok Kumar and Yogeshwar Dutt — had spoken out against the IOA for blighting the achievements of their fraternity and putting Salman on a pedestal, so to speak. Some others, however, showed no such compunction — among them Saina Nehwal and M.C. Mary Kom — who welcomed the appointment.

There are pros and cons to every situation, which should make for a better understanding of the situation through healthy debate. But this soon turned unsavoury as positions got polarised, leading to much gnashing of teeth in the public domain, taking away from the original objective.

All this was avoidable had the IOA been upfront that there were to be multiple goodwill ambassadors. Yet it is not just poor communication strategy that bothers me as much as the niggardly prioritisation by the powers that be in the country’s Olympic association.

Salman was seen as a prize catch and had to be tom-tommed urgently. In the process, Indian athletes were reduced to also-rans, which was insensitive to say the least. That is precisely the miff of the athletes and perfectly justified in my opinion.

Look at it from the sportsperson’s viewpoint. The Olympics comes every four years. That is when they come into the national limelight. This is the period when the toil and struggle to excel — current or past — acquires the greatest meaning. This is the time when past heroes are recalled, their achievements refreshed.

In the last few months leading up to the Olympics is when these sportspersons must get the attention they deserve. To undermine this by turning the gaze on others — whatever their star billing — is unfair and uncalled for.

The fact that biopics on sportspersons like Mary Kom and Milkha Singh (who is not an Olympian medallist) could be huge commercial successes shows that the desire in Indian people today to accept sports heroes, even with their shortcomings and setbacks, has grown enormously.

Imagine the Olympic association in countries like the US, England, Australia (to name a few) bypassing the sportsperson and picking someone else to promote the Games It seems to be me unthinkable that Brad Pitt would be preferred over, say Carl Lewis, as ambassador for the Olympics in the US.

True unlike the US, India does not boast of too many Olympic medal winners who are household names. But that argument is self-defeating in the context of providing impetus to and developing the profile of Indian sports. If sports stars are given the short shrift, how do you expect the young to emulate them

That is the fundamental issue which the IOA, as the custodian of Olympic sports in the country, seemed to have overlooked.