From: hasan@vxcrna.cern.ch 
Subject: Re: India will withdraw from Major Sports
Followup-To: rec.sport.olympics
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Keywords: India, Sports
Organization: European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 16:15:00 GMT

In article <8151@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au>, sxc@cs.adelaide.edu.au (Stephen Crawley) writes...
>In article <10AUG199216473452@vxcrna.cern.ch>, hasan@vxcrna.cern.ch writes:
>|> 	Olympic games have become too much of an arena for celebrating
>|> 	chauvinistic pride. Added to it is the gross commercialization
>|> 	of these games which has made the olympic spirit all but non-
>|> 	existent. 
> 
>Agreed.
> 
>|>      In a way, the Indians can take pride in the fact 
>|> 	that they participated in the games without compromising
>|> 	the high-minded charter with which these games were instituted 
>|> 	by their founding fathers.
> 
>A pity that Indian politicians (and some non-politicians too) don't
>take this attitude.
> 
>|> 	
>|> 	And also, just winning medals does not even require promoting
>|> 	sports in general, but rather focussing on certain selective
>|> 	sports, and those too, not necessarily for the common man. As
>|> 	has been shown by the experience of the elite sport academies
>|> 	in the erstwhile communist countries, and the way the Chinese,
>|> 	the South Koreans and the Spaniards -- to name a few -- have
>|> 	shown dramatic improvements in their olympic medal-hunt, it
>|> 	seems it is not all that difficult if you adopt the right 
>|> 	strategy.
> 
>In Australia, international success in a sport tends to promote
>participation by the populace at large, especially among school
>age kids.  Winning medals promotes sports in general, which in
>turn leads to further success.
>

This is as it should be in a positive sense. What I was deploring
was the obsession for winning medals with anti-olympic motivations
ranging from racial and ideological superiority to rabid nationalism;
and to prove your point with the medal tally. In this case, certain
short cut methods have been proved to be quite effective in producing
winning sportsmen though the sport itself may not be the winner.

>|>      But would my Indian friends like their government to
>|> 	adopt such drastic measures just to trickle their national
>|> 	pride -- though it is a great intoxicant for the rising middle
>|> 	classes. Countries like Great Britain, or even more appropriately, 
>|> 	Austrailia, where people are genuine sport lovers and a lot of
>|> 	money goes into a variety of sports, lately don't seem to have an
>|> 	enviable olympic record.
>|> 
>|> 		-Hasan
> 
>Here I must disagree.  Australia won more medals at the Barcelona
>Olympics than in any year since 1956 when the games were held in
>Melbourne.  We finished with 7 golds, and a total of 28 medals which
>puts us 9th or 10th in the world depending on how you do the ranking.
>Not bad going for a country with a population of around 17 Million.
> 
>You are correct that a lot of money goes into sports here (compared
>with third world contries for example).  I think I heard that the
>cost for training and sending the Aussie team to Barcelona was $A28
>Million.  But a lot of that was raised from the general public and
>from commercial sponsorship.  And I don't think many Australians
>would grudge the few millions of taxes that support top level sport.
>

First of all, though Austrailia did win more medals in Barcelona
than in any Olympic Games since 1956, the number of medals as a
percentage of the total has not increased. But this is not my 
point. Rather than belittling her performance which is probably
the best for a country of the size of Austrailia, I mentioned it
as a "shining" example of genuinely sport loving people. And as
you have yourself pointed out, few Austrailians grudge the 
money spent on sport. What I wanted to say was, the Austrailians
could've won many more medals had they been more hungry about
success per se and had adopted certain radical methods without
necessarily increasing the total amount of money allocated to 
sports. But then these measures would have outraged a lot of
your countrymen and the success in competition itself might
not have the beneficial effects one hopes for.


>Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.
> 
>-- Steve 

	-Hasan
Newsgroups: rec.sport.olympics