We're going to London!

Devendro Singh is just 19. Last month the young Army boxer saw-off experienced opponents like fellow-Armyman Nanao Singh to clinch a spot on the Indian team for the AIBA World Boxing Championships, the first qualifying event for next summer's London Olympics.

Today he justified that performance and the faith of the selectors, booking a spot in the last eight of the competition, and a ticket to London. The light flyweight (49kg) boxer beat seventh-seed Carlos Quipo of Ecuador 18-12 in the round of 16 to make it to the last eight and secure Olympic qualification. The top 10 boxers in each weight at the Worlds will qualify for the London Games.

Devendro was making his debut at the senior international level at these Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan and was particularly emphatic in the previous round with a massive 40-19 win over Joselito Velazquez of Mexico.

The Indian team management said they expected two or three boxers to make the grade for London at this event, but the favourites were the more experienced boxers in the squad--the likes of 2008 Olympic bronze medallist Vijender Singh, light heavy Dinesh Kumar and Navyman Suranjoy Singh. That Devendro would be among the best performers on his first outing at the senior level, will undoubtedly make his coaches happy.

Manoj Kumar joined Devendro in the last eight of the light welterweight (64kg) class with a hard-fought 17-15 win over China's Qing Hu, an Asian Games and World Cup silver medallist. Manoj was down 10-13 after round two, but came back superbly to take the bout. The Commonwealth Games gold medallist is now one win away from an assured World Championships bronze medal.

The attention will now shift to another 19-year-old, Vikas Krishan. Krishan is the reigning World Youth and Asain Games champion and will go up against Turkey's Onder Sipal later in the day. He had a tough previous round against Nurudzinov Mahamed of Belarus, with the judges scoring it an even 10-10 at the end of the bout. It took an individual recount to get a result and Krishan narrowly made it through, 32-31. If his run continues, he will become the third Olympic qualifier. Lightweight Commonwealth Games gold medallist Jai Bhagwan will also be in action this evening in Baku hoping to make it a very decent four qualifiers out of a possible ten for India.

Boxing has emerged as one of India's brightest medal prospects at the London Olympics. After Vijender bagged the nation's first medal in Beinjing in 2008, money has been pumped into the sport and the current quad has considerable strength in depth. Indian boxers came home with plenty of silverware at both the Commonwealth and Asian games in 2010, but the real target has always been the Olympics. Now that these young boxers are getting set for the pinnacle of amateur boxing, it is time for all the hard work to start paying off.

In defense of the indefensible

On July 8, the B samples of Mandeep Kaur, Sini Jose, Juana Murmu and Tiana Mary tested positive for steroids. They were among eight elite athletes who failed dope tests prior to the Asian Athletics Championships. Three of this bunch were members of the women’s relay squad that won gold at the Commonwealth and Asian Games in 2010. With these revelations, the heady feeling of optimism that had been building as preparations for the London Olympics in 2012 continued was swept away, and how.

“[Ashwini] Akkunji [who also tested positive] was the poster girl of Indian athletics, a double gold medallist at the Asian Games, and expected to go on to even greater things. There were genuine hopes of a medal at the London Olympics, but that dream now seems shattered,” wrote Gordon Farquar on the BBC website. They now face automatic two-year bans that will effectively end their careers.

Hopes shattered, dreams dashed, nations humiliated, medals confiscated—that’s how most dope stories usually pan out. But this doping saga is not new. We have heard this story through and through. The athletes get caught, they plead innocence, coaches get sacked and then we start all over again. We decided to take a look at where it all stems from.

“It has to be appreciated that at the time the menace of doping for the health of athletes... had yet to enter the morals because, after this marathon, the official race report said: The marathon has shown, from a medical point of view, how drugs can be very useful to athletes in long-distance races.”
This was said by Dr. Jean-Pierre de Modernard, a scholar in the history of doping in sport.

Dr Modernard was referring to the marathon at the 1904 Olympic Games. The race was won by Thomas Hicks, an American competitor. Hicks actually finished the race second, but the runner finishing first was disqualified because it was found he “ran” half the race in a car. But Hicks too had outside help. When trainer Charles Lucas found his runner flagging, he decided to inject him with a milligramme of sulphate of strychnine and make him drink a large glass of brandy. With four miles of the race to go, Lucas administered another injection. Far from being illegal at the time, the use of medical drugs was considered beneficial and even essential to an athlete.

Let’s put things in perspective. Today, strychnine is used as a pesticide to kill small birds and rodents. After ingestion, the body starts to spasm, which turns into violent convulsions before death by either asphyxiation or sheer exhaustion.
Fred Lorz finished first in 1904 after his 11-mile car ride. “It was just a joke,” he told his interrogators after being found out. “It seemed like a funny idea at the time. I was going to tell you before you gave me the medal. Honest.” They believed his story, but still took away his medal and banned him for a year and gave the gold to the dope-addled, and probably drunk, Hicks.

Times have changed, though, and so has technology. Along with changing times, our morals have gone through a transformation as well. At some stage in the history of sport, the effects of drugs on athletes were considered inhumane. That was when the era of doping control began. But why did athletes start taking performance-enhancing substances in the first place?

It may be an oversimplification but the idea that an army marches on its stomach is not a new one. Nor is it obsolete. Wars throughout history have been won or lost based on the ability of an army to feed and supply itself.

In North Korea today, while the masses starve, the army is always kept well fed. The idea that nutrition corresponds to improved physical performance is pure logic. And the expansion of the definition of nutrition to include a variety of other substances is merely an extension of that chain of thought. Across continents and cultures, naturally occurring drugs like mescaline, opium and cocaine have been used to reduce pain, tiredness, hunger and thirst and result in better performance, whether on the battlefield, while harvesting fields, or in the bedroom. And what is sport if not toil, labour, performance, even war?

So if we were to extend the logic just a little further, the most natural thing for an athlete to do would be to find any way to get an edge over an opponent. It is even more natural for a coach as hungry for success as his ward, to look for other avenues when he finds that the young man or woman he is training will never be good enough to win anything without some help.

Although this may sound like it, it is not an attempt to defend the indefensible. Our 21st-century morals tell us, in no uncertain terms, that sport should be pure. There should be no fixing, no doping, no rigging and no cheating.

But if we were to examine the Indian context, the standard of our sporting achievements is constantly ridiculed when compared with the rest of the world.
Yet, these men and women compete with athletes on whom millions of dollars are spent every year to ensure that they train under the right conditions, travel and live in comfort, have access to the best in terms of sport science, training techniques, medicine and nutrition. Our elite lot get something to the tune of Rs 600 a day when they are part of a national training camp.

The Sports Authority of India is an organisation with limited means. It has political bosses who demand results. It also has to deal with pressure from the media, which is constantly critical of the way it functions and the performance of the athletes under its care. There is pressure from the public, too, which demand medals. The weight of these demands can get too much. If performance targets are not met, funding will be withdrawn, leaving athletes, officials, trainers and administrators to suffer.

For the good of the majority, a few have to make the sacrifice.
Federations fiercely protect these athletes. Tests are engineered or fixed and samples are swapped. This continues until there is a change in the regime. When a new boss comes in, he wants a new coach or athletes from his state. So, the federation stops protecting its doped-up golden geese and the cycle begins again.
Dr. P.S.M. Chandran, a former director of medicine with SAI, has said repeatedly that doping has been a part of the system for over two decades.

But the problem is as much a system that allows doping as it is a system that doesn’t really exist. After the latest story broke, every media outlet went out and demonstrated just how easy it was to get your hands on banned performance enhancers.
It was too hot in New Delhi, so we decided to check if we could just have the dope delivered. Turns out you can. And you don’t even need a credit card. After shooting off e-mails, we received lists of the available drugs, delivery charges and even friendly advice on what to take, depending on how serious we were and what results we wanted. Steroids at the touch of a trackpad—that’s how easy it is.

The trouble, though, is that the systemic failure extends beyond ease of access and “overlooking”. While in countries with more money there are dedicated labs to create masking agents good enough to hide the drugs in an athlete’s urine sample, here, the guinea pig is also the lamb that goes to slaughter.

late, but because nothing beats saying i was there

"Gar firdaus ruhe zameen ast, hamin asto, hamin asto, hamin asto," said Mughal Emperor Jahangir when he thought he had discovered heaven on earth. If Jahangir was a football fan and had managed a ticket to London’s Wembley Stadium for the UEFA Champions League final, there is a good chance he would have changed his mind.
No disrespect to the verdant landscapes of Kashmir but, on Saturday, May 28, the football-watching world—reports estimate about 300 million people watched the game on TV—was lifted, in 90 minutes of magic, straight to footballing heaven.

Manchester United and Barcelona, the champions of England and Spain, considered
the best leagues in the world, were playing for European supremacy. Both clubs have a
rich history in the competition, having won it three times each, before Wembley. And
if the CVs of the teams were impressive, so was the venue. The old Wembley stadium
had hosted the European Cup final five times. Among those was the 1968 final, when United beat Benfica 4–1 to win their first “cup with the big ears”. In 1992, the year before the tournament was rechristened the Champions League, Barcelona’s dream team—led by current coach Josep “Pep” Guardiola and coached by Johann Cruyff—
won their first.

Getting to Wembley wasn’t easy, starting with the first step—convincing the powerful people in the media office at the UEFA headquarters that you are a legitimate football writer.

But as an Indian journalist at the season’s biggest game, the hardest part of it all happens, perhaps, when you walk into the magnificent stadium and are standing by the elevator when the biggest names in football walk past you to get to a room where they will sit down and answer your questions.

What do you do? Do you behave like a professional and tell yourself that, at the end of the day, it’s just another football game? Or do you just walk around star-struck, delighted that Manchester United legend Andy Cole signed your copy of the official matchday programme (which us lucky media freebie hunter types didn’t have to shell out 10 quid for), even though you are as far from being a United fan as the Sun is from Pluto (not sure if that conveys exactly how far I am from being a United fan, but it was the best I could do at the time)?

It’s a tough choice. The game was watched around the world but, on that night, the stadium was like a slice of the planet. All of Europe was represented, as was North America, but the flags hanging off the ramparts were far more diverse. From Brazil to Bermuda, Algeria to Thailand, China to Nigeria—if ever there was a cosmopolitan crowd, this was it. Much is said of the global appeal of football and very little proof of the pudding is needed when you talk to a fan who has spent months saving up and then travelled thousands of miles to witness sport in its purest form.
Walking into the stadium on matchday was a surreal experience. To have the gladiators of the 21st century perform for you while the rest of the world watches is special in ways that cannot be described. To the players, it may have been about winning. To the fans, it may have been about the glory, and to the clubs it may have been about pride and the not exactly small amounts of money along with it. But to an Indian journalist among the 90,000 faithful at the Wembley, it was about being a tiny part of history.

On May 27, match eve, Sir Alex Ferguson seemed a relaxed man. He entered the press
conference room with Nemanja Vidic, Rio Ferdinand and a big smile. “This could
be the best final of the decade.” The facts clearly backed his statement. About 26
hours later, he would be back in the same room to say, “In my time as manager, I
would say they’re the best team we’ve faced. Everyone acknowledges that and I accept
it. It’s not so easy when you’ve been well beaten like that to think another way. No one has given us a hiding like that.” True.

On Saturday night (I supposed it is now I few Saturday nights ago), in front of a full house, Barcelona took to the pitch and handed United a footballing lesson that can only be described as a masterclass.

The game was won in the middle of the park. As expected, Barca played three in midfield—Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Sergio Busquets—with Lionel Messi playing in front of them and David Villa and Pedro Rodriguez as inside forwards. The wide players drew defenders, opening up space in the middle. With players like Messi and Xavi, there is very little room to relax. When given space, they can be devastating—exactly what they were.

The incredible part of watching Barca play is how hard the players work on and off the ball. When in possession, they are calm and watchful, and the midfielders have the vision of Shiva’s third eye. Barca completed 667 passes with 63 per cent possession. United didn’t make half that number.

At Wembley, they did to United what United do to other clubs in the Premier League, week in, week out. Barca broke them down, blow-by-blow, play-by-play, and when United were on the ropes, the Catalans delivered the knockout punch. And the best
part—they made it look effortless.

After the game, Messi praised “incredible” Barcelona. But, while no one doubts the win was a team effort, Xavi put things in perspective. “He (Messi) is the number one, he makes the difference—he is the best player in the world,” said Xavi. Messi scored the decisive goal, like he did two years ago in Rome. It was his 12th goal in 13 Champions League games this season. Cristiano Ronaldo may have scored 40 in the La Liga but Messi may have put an end to the debate over who the world's best player is.

The Catalan club joined Bayern Munich and Ajax at the next level, with four European Cups. The current generation of Barcelona players has won it all. They are spoken of in the same tones as the Madrid squad of the late 50s; the Ajax, Bayern and Liverpool teams of the 70s; and the treblewinning Man United team of 1999. And they have a certain Leo Messi.

Most of us have not had the fortune of seeing older sides play football. We have all seen this Barcelona team, though. While the debate over which of these sides is actually the best club side ever might be an endless one, there is a clear fact. In the evolution of football, teams from half a century ago played a very different style of the game. There wasn’t nearly as much running, possession was given away cheaply and defending was not really a priority.

In the 1956 final, Madrid beat Stade de Reims-Champagne 4–3. Four years later, in
1960, they beat Borussia Dortmund 7–3. A 7–3 result in a Champions League final today
would be inconceivable. “I didn’t see the Ajax of Cryuff, I didn’t see the Real Madrid of Di Stefano and the Santos of Pele,” said Guardiola, summing up the debate after the game. “But if in 10 or 15 years’ time, people remember us for the football we are playing now, that will make me very happy.”

Football may transcend cultures, but it is a tribal sport. Football fans are its fiercely warring tribes. But Barcelona have a quality that make them different. For followers of the sport, Barcelona is a uniting factor.

And there’s a reason for this, it’s the way they make the game truly beautiful. Like
this: In March, Barca leftback Eric Abidal underwent surgery to remove a tumour from his liver. He recovered and was a surprise starter on the night. When asked why he was chosen to lift the trophy, Guardiola said, “It just shows what kind of human beings these players are. This is what makes us strong. It is a privilege to train these players.” And to an Indian football writer among the 90,000 faithful at the Wembley, it was a privilege tp have seen this great team take the field as one.

The sport that makes grown men cry like babies, and its need to grow up

Question: What fosters a greater sense of loyalty/intimacy, sex or playing on the same team?

This came up sometime last year under circumstances that seemed interesting at the time. The question, though, seemed rather more interesting than the circumstances, and I have spent the last six months, clocking unlimited miles, on a personal research project to arrive at a conclusive answer.

Of course, my research was thoroughly biased. As cool as it would be to say that I have been scouring the earth in search of companions with whom I could test the parameters of my hypothesis, I have to admit that isn’t the case. Instead—thanks to the best job in the world and an editor who doesn’t say no to travel unless she absolutely has to—it’s been a six-month all you can eat football buffet.

It began in New Delhi. Home is always the starting point. Here there is easy access to boys of all ages. If you are confused now about what this “research” entailed, don’t be alarmed. These boys of all ages form Yatagan United, the small, unfunded and thoroughly unprofessional weekend football club I am happy to be a part of. Unknowingly, they became a part of my experiment. Every Saturday and Sunday, I would come back from the game, go into my study and lock myself up for hours so that my findings would be recorded for posterity. Okay, maybe after football I just went for a few beers with the same boys, but, if I had a study I am sure I would have locked myself in it.

Anyway, the point is that I began to get confused and frustrated very quickly. I walked into this exercise putting team sport (football in particular) on the same venerated plane as that most holy of male pursuits—the hunt for the female. I thought that the bond shared by men who played on the same team was in some way superior to the one created by sharing a bed. I thought that the homoeroticism of bum-slapping and communal showers eclipsed hand-holding and making out in movie halls. Oh, but I was wrong.

Within a month, the desertions began. Some—and it hurt me so much to realise I was one of the traitors—moved on to other, equally unprofessional clubs. Clubs with names like South Delhi Dynamos, for the love of god. The crimes of others were even more horrific. Tales of dalliances with the violin, salsa lessons, college examinations and shopping trips with girlfriends shook the very foundation of my universe. Everything I had believed in for over a quarter of a century was falling apart. Where was this hallowed brotherhood?

Its called various things in various places. The prowl, the hunt, shikaar. All terms used to indicate a predatory, macho activity. The object can be food, booze or women. It doesn’t matter that we are now food producers. Man will always be on the hunt.

In the next few months the research project went from Delhi to Doha, where the Indian team was playing. Then back home and to Assam, Kerala, Kolkata, Goa, and finally to Wembley, the home of football and venue for the 2011 Champions League final (more on that later, but if you can't wait, you can pick up a copy of Sports Illustrated India for just 50 bucks at a newsstand near you). And it was finally at Wembley that it hit me. I was never going to have my “hence proved” moment.

Watching Ryan Giggs turn out for the 16,793,000th time for Manchester United drove home the all-important fact. Giggs is the anomaly. He is one of the few footballers who chose a club and remained loyal to it. In his personal life he may have been the hunter, but he made his choice. The team came first.

Most others, whether they play professionally or just a weekend kickabout, fail on both counts. If a top striker suddenly wants to move from Barcelona to Madrid, it is quite possible that he is as enticed by the extra 50,000 pounds a week, as he is by the prospect of exploring a new world of female wares.

There was something said about football being a metaphor for life and if it is, it is pretty ugly. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sport. But as I attempt to go the other way, to find the loyalty factor, I don’t like what my sport says about me. Or what I say about the sport.

Footballers are a tribe, or maybe a pack. Hundreds of pro footballers have spoken at length and on the record about the variety in their sex lives. It is the all-important stamp of virility. “I play football= I can do it like a stallion.” But when there is a wolf who separates from the pack, he gets eaten alive.

Justin Fashanu was the first black footballer in Britain to command a million pound transfer fee when he went to Nottingham Forest in 1980. He was also gay and after years of keeping quiet about his sexuality, he told the world. If he thought coming out would help, it didn’t. the focus became even more glaring. Fashanu eventually moved to the US and ended up killing himself in 1998 after he was accused (and later cleared) of having committed sexual assault. Between 1990 and 2008, not a single professional footballer made a similar disclosure.

Then there was the case of Graeme LeSaux, the former Chelsea and England leftback who I should have the honour of meeting tomorrow afternoon. Le Saux is not gay, yet he had to deal with being labeled a homosexual and taunted for it throughout his playing career. Apparently it was because he didn’t go out drinking enough with the boys and he read the Guardian. If that equals gay then I suppose going to university would make you a “flaming queen”.

In England, racism is not a major problem on the football field any longer. Fans don’t make the monkey noises and throw bananas onto the pitch when they see a balck player, like they still do in some other parts of Europe. But being gay would be like being black in the 50s. Sexuality and sexual choice is taken as a weakness and exploited ruthlessly. In his book, Le Saux recounts an incident, “At Anfield once I went over to the touchline to get the ball because a kid in the crowd was holding it. “He was no more than 10 and his dad was next to him. “You fucking poof, you take it up the arse,” he screamed at me. His dad joined in.” The kid was 10.
There are many more such incidents that illustrate why gay footballers are frightened of coming out, but also that football does nothing to stand up for gay rights.

In trying to find the answer to the sex versus team sports question, I had failed. But in the state of the game may lie a crucial bit of insight into another big question—why so many women hate football.

Being the more mature and tolerant of the sexes, I’m guessing more heterosexual women are gay-friendly than heterosexual men. More heterosexual women are certainly more gay-friendly than heterosexual (male) footballers. So is it this seething vortex of homophobia what has driven the female billions away from what is otherwise the most beautiful game on the planet? Or is it just revulsion that comes with recognizing the quality of a man who plays football? The realization that he will turn his back on her for a younger, newer model as easy as he would change the badge on the shirt he pulls on every Saturday evening.

I was there

It's 1800 hrs on the eve of the "epic" world cup semifinal. The scuttlebutt is mostly about fixing. Has a certain interested party, with access to more money than most major corporations, ensured that the most accomplished cricketer still on the circuit finishes his career with a winners' medal? Is this the scripted final chapter in the legend of Sachin Tendulkar? It is also production day and by that hour, since none of us have tickets in hand, we are more concerned with getting our pages in order so we don's have to come in the next day. World Cup or not, no one wants to work when its pretty much a national holiday.
The phone rings. "Kya kar raha hai," is the standard question. "Kaam pe. Kya plan hai?" equally standard reply. "Get to CP in an hour, we're leaving for Chandigarh at seven thirty."
I am a confessed non-cricket fan. In the Indian context, I guess that means I can't tell you, off the top of my head, who took five wickets against India in South Africa's first world cup game after apartheid isolation. I would have guessed Allan Donald, but that is only because I wouldn't be able to name a single other bowler on that squad. Or even which world cup it was.
I claim, if India were playing cricket and any other sport at the same time, I would watch the other. The other sports tag, I suppose, is a kind of inverse snobbery. When the call came though, I was ready to drop everything, production deadline included, and get on the metro to town and on to Mohali. Are there about a billion other Indians, including the poor sods who agreed to finish my pages at work, who deserved that call more than I did? Sure. Did I give a shit? Not for a second.
It has been a while since Mohali. The legend of Tendulkar is complete, scripted or not. But I still haven't been able to put a finger on why there was never any doubt about accepting the offer.
Was it the promise of an all-boys road trip in the middle of the week--something I haven't done in years, complete with fancy borrowed SUV to bomb down some golden highway corridor and a couple of bottles of duty free tharra for company? Maybe, but sausage-fests are a regular part my life and, back in the days when I used to drink, the missus could always drink me under. So maybe not.
Was it the joyous prospect of watching the motherland stick a sporting trident (how very Hindu) in the heart of the neighbouring rogue state? This is the tough question. Before the cricket semis, India had already beaten Pakistan in the hockey world cup and the AFC challenge cup qualifiers (football, if you must know). It was all happening in the space of about one financial year. The subcontinent can perhaps be described as the global centre for sporting mediocrity. But just because we still haven't been able to break the 10-second barrier in the 100m sprint doesn’t mean we don't relish a bit of sporting bloodshed among neighbours. And this was, after all, one step away from a shot at a world championship. Other than the giants of kabbaddi, that tag eludes most of us over-eaters and under-performers. So yes, it was that, to an extent.
The PCA stadium at Mohali is bollocks. It took us about an hour to get into the ground (this despite being part of the privileged few to get parking stickers). It was two in the afternoon and as hot as coalminer's armpit. It probably even smelt the same. Our seats were perfect, but unfortunately the host broadcaster had decided to erect a pillar in front, presumably to capture audience audio. So, when Gautam Gambhir got out, I had to ask cricinfo how it happened.
All this gave me plenty of time to think about why I was there. I realised my reasons were the same as the other 5000 people in my stand. 1) There was the possibility of being on TV. 2) There were stale samosas and flat pepsi. 3)I could update my facebook status with a cool yet understated "I was there" if we won (sadly the guy sitting next to me did it before I could). 4) Did I mention the cricket?
There is a fifth reason too. And this I say as a tribute to the hardcore cricket loving gent who got my ticket, drove me to Mohali and lovingly fed me single malt while taking a piss off the balcony of a room in a very "law and order type" part of Chandigarh. The cricket is in our bloody Indian blood. No matter how many years you spend getting in shit kicked out of you at football games in north London, or how many Kronenbourgs you drink at Roland Garros, you will scream with joy Zaheer Khan bowls a beauty, Sachin plays a cover driver or hold your head in your hands and cry when the middle order conspires to collapse after the guys on top seem to have taken the team home. There is no other way to explain it. Kindly gent, I bow to your wisdom.