Pronounced Gill-ty

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

What would you call an Olympian who is not an Olympian? L Suresh finds out…

It’s out. And it’s official. Gerhard Rach, ex-coach of the Indian hockey team thinks the Indian Hockey Federation is a big madhouse. Gill thinks those who played in the Olympics are not Olympians. Zafar Iqbal thinks Gill’s knowledge of hockey is very poor. Gill thinks Rach’s knowledge of English is very poor. Deft passes, mighty pushes, sensational scoops… when it comes to playing the (blame) game, the Indian team needs to learn a thing or two from the super-cop and his ‘Police Academy – Part D-uh’ bunch of administrators.

Of course, after having played 36 matches against the world’s top five countries in 2004 and having won just four of them, anybody can teach the team to play. (Incidentally, speculations are abound that the Indian team’s coming-apart-at-the-seams look and their habit of winning just one out of every nine matches they play gave rise to the adage, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, but since the authenticity of this source can never be proved, we shall let this one pass.) Things ultimately reached a point where French captain Antoine Moreau remarked that they faced stiffer resistance from Indian Airlines. (Sigh, millions of Indians will agree to that.)

But the question on everybody’s mind is – If Gill thinks those who played in the Olympics are not Olympians, then what would you call an Olympian who is not an Olympian? In true Rashomon style, there were four versions of the answer.

Solutions you don’t have to Rach your brains for (Rach’s version)
Simple, drop all the Olympians from the team. So the team participating in the Olympics will not have any Olympians! I did just that – and they dropped me as coach.

Verdict: Stop answering stupid questions and watch out for your backside. With Gill’s support, I was breathing freely. Now, halfway across the world to Egypt, I feel like a fish out of water.

The Extraordinary League of Ordinary Gentlemen (IHF’s version)
If Gill has announced that those who played in the Olympics are not Olympians, we (Indian Hockey Federation) obviously cannot do a reverse flick on the issue. So we arrived at a simple solution – if you cannot convince, confuse. Thus came about the Premier Hockey League (PHL), which divides the stick-wielding fraternity of the country into two tiers, creatively labeled Tier I and Tier II. In all there would be 10 teams, with 13 foreign players (a number arrived at after some mind-numbing calculations) spread across five teams in Tier I - Hyderabad Sultans, Bangalore Hi-Fliers, Sher-e-Jallandhar, Maratha Warriors and Chennai Veerans.

Verdict: If Gill says they are not Olympians, they are NOT Olympians. They could be (take-your-pick) Chennai Veerans, Hyderabad Sultans or Maratha Warriors, but not Olympians.

Lights, camera, ach-tung! (A senior official’s version)
This one is straight out of a movie set. And a German one at that! The story starts in 1936 and stars the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler surrounded by his yes-yes men, Messrs. Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Joachim Ribbentrop. They try to get the hockey wizard Dhyan Chand to defect and join them in their bunkers. Obviously he thought they were bonkers and decided to give it a miss. (Being trapped between the Brits in his motherland and the Germans in their fatherland was no laughing matter, though it did remind the great man of Tom and Jerry. The whole world watched in suspended animation as he led India to an 8-1 victory.) Years rolled by. The world saw the third Reich fall. They saw the Berlin Wall fall. With Gerhard Rach, they saw a German shepherd the Indian team into various tournaments and they saw the standards of Indian hockey fall.

Verdict: Olympian or not, anyone who refuses the German hand goes straight to the squad – the firing squad, that is.

Sentenced by the Gill-otine (Gill’s version)
Be specific. And don’t twist my quotes conveniently so that you can write pieces on them. Anyways, it depends on which Olympics you are talking about. If it is before 1966, they are not Olympians – they are winners. If it’s after 1966, they’re a bunch of losers. If it’s 1980, they are just people with vested interests. And since our performance has been so pathetic after ’80, they don’t deserve to be called Olympians - just call them ‘Limpians’.

Verdict: Hockey players should possess superb reflexes. As soon as an official blows the whistle on the team, they should be the first off the chopping block. And if they can’t, sigh, it doesn’t matter what you call them.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 23 Jan, 2005)