Theirs
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Australia, “FORMER tennis star Nicole Bradtke embodied Melbourne’s Olympic spirit yesterday by watching the Athens torch relay only hours after giving birth………………. Only 18 hours after her second child, Jensen arrived, Nicole left hospital to cheer on her basketballer husband as he carried the torch.”
USA has released its list of torch runners.
I kept searching for the likes of Madonnas, Sharone Stones, Spears in this list but they are conspicuous by their absence. Cruise, Stallone are invited to carry flame but they are not the frontrunners.
China
The youngest torch-bearers
Fourteen-year-old Ye Lu and He Zhouling are the youngest torch-holders this time in Beijing. One of the two girls, Ye Lu, is not only a junior correspondent with Chinese Teenagers News, but also an activist in Beijing’s bidding for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games and environment protection. He Zhouling is a student from a school under the Project Hope program in a mountainous area in Guizhou Province. She, too, was lucky enough as she fulfilled her Olympic dream by leaving her hometown and coming to Beijing for the first time. She has become a heroine-like figure, a glory to her fellow-townspersons.
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OURS
I remember one budding athlete saying, “When we go for 3-4 times road running, bench-press, complete stair running, squat innumerable times, only then we are able to reduce our timings by a tenth of a second. It takes at least one month.” This was the statement of a state level athlete, not of some-one who was a placeholder in National Games.
I thought OUR LIST would include P.T. Usha, Shiny Abharam, Ashwani Nachappa, Marvin Fernandis, Mohammad Shaid, Ashok Kumar, Wilson Cherian, Zeeshan Ali, Prakash Padukone, Geet Sethi, Subhash Agrawal………………
Who were OUR frontrunners? That I will discuss later. I remember one more incident.
I was watching a friendly football match between film stars and cricketers. This game demands some stamina, after all you have to do sprinting many times in a decent sized field. Here, there was no such camera and make-up to conceal your eye bags and dark circles. They might bash-up goons in one shot, which merely takes few minutes to complete, then they cool off their heels in the AC vans till the next shot is ready. The blessing of booze and cigarettes will be sort of different from other blessings. The steroid pumped muscles might be pleasing visuals for starry eyed dumbos and dudes, but in a football field they won’t carry you far.
So, OUR frontrunners were……
The very people, who in the above mentioned friendly football match with cricketers, came out of the field, huffing and puffing, carrying 45 years old lungs in 25 years young body! Our Honorable Sports Minister and President of the Olympic Association are probably ignorant of this fact, called hard work, that even a state level athlete puts into. Or rather they are ashamed of the performance of the hard-working athletes, who inspite of their rotten system, dared to pick-up sports as a career and above all performed and done something for India.
What was our role in all this? We engaged in tussle with security, broken barricades, climbed up the tree to have a glimpse of Ash Rai, Rani, and Bipasa Basu!
We, the people of this generation, really become so dimwitted, that unless and until, things are presented in visuals, rather pleasing visuals, we refuse to rise to occasion? Do everything for us, should be tightly sewn, attractively packaged, applied with strokes of gloss and glitz, only then we sit up and take notice?
