Category: World Service
Date: 24.01.2006
Printable version
The Â鶹Éç World Service has brought together Athens silver medallist Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, the politician and former cricketer Chetan Chauhan, sports broadcaster and author Novy Kapadia and President of the Indian Olympic Committee Suresh Kalmadi to discuss India's Olympic future.
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Below is a selection of quotes from Sports International, broadcast at 3.30pm GMT on Wednesday 25 January and available online via bbcworldservice.com.
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Suresh Kalmadi: "We are going on a long-term vision - we have got the 2010 Commonwealth Games, also bidding for the 2014 Asian Games, and then we are aiming for Olympics as well. In India it's all cricket and more cricket... and through these big events we want to popularise Olympic sports.
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"Unfortunately, the corporate sector is only running towards cricket and more cricket. I have been trying to convince them to sponsor Olympic sports and if you get a medal out of that the amount of mileage the corporate could get is something phenomenal.
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"Rajyavardan Singh Rathore, our silver medallist shooter, is now being sponsored and many shooters are now being sponsored, and slowly the concept is coming in, but now with the Commonwealth Games coming I am sure industry will come forward.
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"We are going on a separate track to create these champions: getting foreign coaches, taking our teams abroad for coaching and we are now concentrating on the younger people and our target is 2016!"
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Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore:
"It was absolutely amazing to see the reaction of the people when I returned to the country from Athens.
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"The bottom line was that every countryman was proud of the fact that we had won a silver medal there and proved to some extent that we could do it.
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"Of course, it needs to be done many times over. We have the potential for that.
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"[Indian tennis star] Sania [Mirza] is a contender for an Olympic medal and I hope she stands alongside me. She's a great motivator for a lot of women in our country. But still I guess we must all understand that Sania comes from a very affluent background and people like Sania, me and many others have things that are laid out for them.
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"Eighty or 90 per cent of the Indian population does not have access to these kind of things the elite have access to. In that 80% lies the cream of the talent for India. If India has to beat China or America, we have to address that 80%, we have to address those Muslim women... we have to get them out of the houses. We have to get the Hindu women out of the houses. That is the essence of it.
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"Countries around the world are putting a lot of emphasis on building their image of the country. Although we are changing, it's a very slow pace. We need to prioritise and we need to get more involved with skill-based games.
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"We were great in hockey as long as it was played on the field but when it went to astro-turf, it went to speed and power. We are good in cricket because we are good in skill, we have some good batsmen. We don't have a real pace bowler because that is where we are lacking in speed and strength.
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"We need to build small sporting structures all around to give access to people. And we need to give financial security to people who get involved in sport.
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"Noone wants to take the risk to be a sportsman, there is no future in it unless you are among the top ten in the country. And, from a billion population, to be just top ten is a very rare feat, so you need to have financial security from small levels."
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Chetan Chauhan: "The simple question the parents ask is what the child is going to do when he plays unless he gets a gold medal or becomes a Sunil Gavaskar, Tendulkar or another superstar...
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"He cannot even make his ends meet, so why should be go in for sports instead of spending hours studying so he can make a career. These are the kind of problems the Government will have to look into.
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"With the competition among the students, especially towards education, our schools and colleges which used to promote sports... don't even have tournaments every year now.
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"Sport is completely vanishing from the universities and that is because of lack of funds. This is where the Government should come in."
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