Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
Combat sports are a whole other animal, we all know this. Fighters train their whole lives to never make an emotional decision, to always stay calm and rational. They have to; otherwise they lose—best case scenario—or far worse. In combat sports, the one who gets angry first is the one to lose, at least as a general rule. That’s why sledging and trash-talking came about in the first place; to incite one’s opponent/s to lose their cool and do something stupid, causing them to lose; and this aspect doesn’t even apply exclusively to combat sports, though any boxing fan would immediately speak of Ali and how he always went out of his way to incite rage in his opponent, and how he always won when that happened.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about Sarita Devi. First, as someone with a deep understanding of combat sports, I’ll give you a general rule of thumb in boxing that would hold good 99 times out of 100. The fighter that initiates the clinch more often is losing the fight.
Fact 1: Sarita Devi initiated the clinch once in the whole fight, in the first round, as compared to 15 times by Ji Na Park, who did it a whopping 5 times in the 3rd round alone.
A rabbit punch is a punch thrown at the back of a fighter’s neck, or to the base of their skull. It is dangerous, can be crippling, and, most damningly, illegal. It is a part of what constitutes “dirty boxing,” which is essentially when a boxer continues punching while in the clinch.
Fact 2: Park threw 2 rabbit punches; once in the 3rd round and once in the 4th, both times when still in the clinch. Further to that, she was dirty boxing just about every time she initiated the clinch from round 2 onwards, and, in fact, even received warnings from the referee in the 2nd and 4th rounds.
By my scoring, and any fight fan will tell you that they always score a fight, Devi won the 2nd, 3rd and 4th rounds, including two 10-8 rounds—the 3rd because she heavily outscored Park and the 4th because of a terrible and deliberate rabbit punch, for the second time, that any half-competent referee would have deducted a point for. This meant Devi should have won the fight 39-35, though an argument can be made that it should only be 39-37. Either way, there’s no way in hell Devi lost that fight.
That being considered, and considering that Devi is a trained and experienced fighter who knows better than to ever lose her cool, was her conduct on the podium justified? For those that don’t know what happened, she refused to accept her medal while standing on the bronze podium, then she took it in her hand, and during the Chinese Anthem (the GOLD went to Chinese fighter, Junhau Yin), walked over to Park and put it around her neck. Later, after the medal had been thrust back upon her, she left it on a table when leaving from the prize ceremony.
Before the ceremony, she had appealed the decision. The IOA (Indian Olympic Association, a group of bureaucrats that are supposed to understand sports and look after our elite when on international tours, among other things) did not support her in the slightest. She borrowed MONEY from a kind Indian journalist and put in whatever she had (the appeal costs $500, if you can believe that) and appealed. I have absolutely no idea what the appeal process is even about, because the appellate board then informed her that they could not reverse the judges’ decision. And they kept the $500 too!
That many of the events were fixed to give the hosts South Korea an advantage is obvious, so let’s get that out of the way first. If this incident wasn’t enough, Tugstsogt Nyambayar of Mongolia also got cheated out of his victory against South Korean Ham Sang-Myeong in the men’s bantamweight division and Devendro Singh Laishram beat the living daylights out of (again) South Korea’s Shin Jong-Hun—to a point where it looked like Jong-Hun was about to concede defeat in the 4th round when the bell rang (Laishram had controlled all 4 rounds with panache) but was still handed a loss by the (not so) subtle judges.
Devendro Laishram took it lying down because Rajiv Mehta, the IOA General Secretary, again did absolutely nothing.
However, whatever else may have happened, should a fighter, trained to control their emotions under the worst of conditions, have reacted to the situation the way Sarita Devi did? After all, if she can take a battering to the face for ten straight minutes, surely she should have maintained her composure at this juncture, right? Wrong. Fighters are trained to accept physical hardships, and operate under the most intense encouragement to rage; not deal with heartbreak.
submit that when that incredibly shocking decision was handed down, Sarita Devi could still have dealt with it if her organization had backed her up even a little.
We can mock the institute of the Asian Games, but I’d rather discuss the IOA here. The IOA is headed by N Ramachandran, the brother of former BCCI chief, N Srinivasan. When the only persons that stood up for her were her husband Chongtham Thoiba Singh (who was himself extremely emotional) and the team’s boxing coach coach, Cuban Blas Fernandez, I can only imagine the heartache she must have gone through. She herself expressed her emotions implicitly when she said, “All the training means nothing when such things happen. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We sacrifice so much, even time with our kids.”
Now this is where the intelligence and training of a fighter came in handy to her again, for any right-thinking individual would have, first and foremost, slammed the Indian Olympic Association for lacking the decency to even back up its athletes. She didn’t, however, because bureaucrats, unlike sportspersons, would hold her comments against her, and she would never get to represent her country in an international event again.
For her to give her all in the ring, come back from a first round—where she was off target for the most part and her opponent took advantage of that to hone in on her chin repeatedly—and still deliver the thrashing she did was, in itself, an amazing performance for any athlete. But when all that happens, she gets robbed of a victory, and then finds that her own supposedly supporting organization lacks the fortitude to even back her up, leave alone speak up for her… my heart feels heavy when I even try to imagine it; and in a foreign land, when she is fighting for her flag, it was nothing short of betrayal. They betrayed her and they betrayed her country: us.
The IOA was banned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2012 and told that it “must be in a position to hold free, fair, transparent, and credible elections without any external interference and exclusively on the basis of Olympic Charter and IOA’s Constitution.” They were, of course, speaking of the politics that we Indians are notorious for being able to bring into absolutely anything. It was reconstituted in February this year, but it seems obvious that the new committee under Ramachandran is about as effective as the old one under Suresh Kalmadi, and I am at a loss as to how his election to the post could have been deemed credible when there was no other candidate for the post. Are we really to believe that not one other individual in this grossly over-populated nation of ours was either suitable for or interested in heading the IOA? So much so that a person who has never been a sportsperson should be elected unopposed?
Sarita Devi was justified because she had no choice, and she needs to know that we, as a nation support her to the hilt. Shame on N Ramachandran and his crew for even letting her feel backed into a position where she had to do what she did, and shame on us as a nation for allowing nonsensical organizations such as the current IOA to represent us on the international stage, or even just exist!
