Ugly side of sports

Why should politics and its cronies enter the sports arena-only because some gentlemen have no other way of making an appearance or a manly statement?

- RAJEEV NARAYAN

“Hiring and promoting talented women is the right thing to do for society. It is also an economic imperative.” – Carlos Ghosn

It had to happen and it has, eventually. Idiots are creeping in to harvest the dividends of the hard work of hundreds in Indian sports. And we are allowing it. These idiots are not just trying to grab the riches that come with the sporting success of others; they are also trying to grab female bodily paraphernalia, we are now informed. A host of lady wrestlers, among them Asian Games, Commonwealth Games and Olympics medal-winners and champions, are claiming that male managers have been assaulting them for a long time, sexually and otherwise. Threats and innuendos come their way in the most inspirited manner all the time. If they do not accede, they are shunted, cast aside. Talk about yeoman-ship and sportsman’s spirit. We have lost it.

I was born in the summer of 1969, which Bryan Adams has personally acknowledged. Since that blissful summer, when I was stretching my tiny limbs and yawning with my small mouth, I have witnessed matters dither and wane to such apostrophe where we have lost the right to bespeak even the most parabolic English. We have atrophied, not just in intrinsic muscle and thought, but in sheer decency too. The last few years have been telling, when we have degenerated to a level that we fail to have the gall to call a spade a spade, or an ass an ass. How else do you justify the heads of sports federations today hitting on young female athletes and getting away with it? And when the athletes protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, why do we throw them asunder? And then call them back?