Our Olympians... and our OASIS

A preview on OASIS first... we've been having a huge discussion on OASIS in our mailing list... it's mostly been FashP but we seem to be moving on now... someone else can probably plug in the blog on it.

Anyways, I and Goyal had another discussion... mostly guided by a rediff article... (you can read that here)... and we both were of the opinion that the author's been a little too harsh. We don't have the world's best sportsman, that's a fact... so instead of blaming them, we perhaps need to delve into why the state is such. Personally, I think anyone who blames Anju Bobby George is out of his mind... as are all those people who called her this big Indian medal hope... realistically speaking, yes, she had a chance but everyone, from the officials to the media made it seem like she had a 99% chance or something... It's one thing to encourage our players, it's quite another to pressure them... which is what we do everytime. She went there and bettered her personal best, what more do we want from her? If her best wasn't good enough, it's not her fault, it's our fault.

If she has to come up with excuses, it's because we don't congratulate her on doing so well, we ask her why she didn't win... she hardly needs to be defensive of her performance... I for one, am proud of her... We really shouldn't be asking her why she didn't return with a medal when the figures show she actually did better than she has ever done.

And the best part is everything is now gonna be forgotten till Jan 2008... when everyone will wake up again... how many of us tracked our medal hopefuls during their progress in the past 4 years... how many of us had heard of Karnam Malleswari before she won a bronze in Sydney? I'm sure 80% of us didn't know Rathore some 15 days before Olympics started... why should we just blame the authorities saying they ignore our sportsmen... do we remember them?

The aim here is not to win an Olympic medal, it's to create world class athletes who will win everywhere. At other championships as well as the Olympics. And we have to start now... There will be some who like Lee-Hesh might not be able to make it but we already know they're right up there with the best in the world, they hardly need to prove it.