Category — India

Come on, Abhinav, go ahead and bite that Olympic gold medal to test if it is real. Abhinav, who won the gold for the men’s 10 meters air rifle, earns the distinction as the first individual gold medalist for India. He’s a smart cookie too; he’s got an MBA and is the CEO of Abhinav Futuristics.

India related Olympic stories:
Round II: The Paes-Bhupathi “Will We Play Doubles Together?” Saga
Olympians to Watch: Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes

Photo source: beijing2008

In the first round we had Mahesh Bhupathi proclaiming that he doesn’t want to play doubles with Leander Paes in the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games.

Not surprisingly, Leander Paes — a bronze medalist during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — poured his heart out “saying that he was hurt” by Bhupathi’s conduct.

According to our source: An emotionally charged Paes sounded more pained at the way Bhupathi has gone about the whole business of teaming up with him and also by the latter’s unwillingness to discuss the problems with him directly.

Despite the current hard feelings between the two, Paes is still hoping that a Paes-Bhupathi doubles team will materialize in Beijing:

“At the end of the day, we will be hurting ourselves by deflecting our focus from the goal, thus putting additional pressure to get a medal. There is no team better than Leander and Bhupathi to get an Olympic medal.”

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India’s best Olympic medal hope, the tennis doubles team of Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes are not exactly best buds right now — Mahesh says he doesn’t want to pair with Leander because Leander is off doing other things instead of going to tune-up tournaments with him — but Leander believes that they can bring home a gold medal for the second most populous country in the world. [Ooops, sorry for the very long sentence.]

Will these two settle their differences in time to go for the gold? Let’s wait for the next chapter.

PHOTO SOURCE: ibnlive.com

Here’s something we should all support: yoga in the Olympics. Yes, there’s a group in India which is starting a campaign to have yoga admitted as an Olympic sport. We here at The Olympian Blog doesn’t see any reason why it should not be admitted. Seriously.

After all, isn’t the criteria for the inclusion of an Olympic sport only goes like this:

[F]or the Summer Games, only sports/disciplines widely practiced by men in at least 75 countries and on four continents, and by women in at least 40 countries and on three continents may be included.

Surely yoga is widely practiced in more than 75 countries as well as in three continents. In fact, we’d like to think that it is more practiced and more popular than trampoline and all those rowing events. And it’s a very Olympian sport too. Look at the photos below (courtesy of photopostcards.com). Can you name an Olympic sport that is as challenging as this? Seriously. Can you?

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What is it with sports officials that they seem to have a propensity to snub their former sports stars. First we have former Olympians from Malaysia complaining about being snubbed during the Olympic torch relay in Kuala Lumpur.

Now we have, Indian Olympians also feeling slighted. From Sportstar:

[T]he sole criterion concerning the selection of a sports personality says, the person should “be distinguished for contributions to the Olympic Movement or for extraordinary performance at past Olympic Games.”

Three such personalities were available in Delhi, but they were not called. Sriram Singh, one of the finest athletes India has produced, a finalist in the 800 metres in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, was hoping to get a call, but it never came. Sriram still holds the National record of 1:45.77 that he set in the final in Montreal.

At the same Games, Hari Chand set another National record, that of 28:48.72 in the 10,000 metres that has remained intact. He too was ignored. Both Sriram and Hari Chand are also double gold medal winners in the Asian Games. Then there was R. S. Bhola, the hockey veteran of the 1956 Melbourne Games where India won the gold and Rome Olympics where India took the silver.

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