BAI website gives Jwala-Ponnappa WC bronze a miss

Badminton fans in the country cannot stop raving about the exploits of doubles stars Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa, who created history last Sunday by winning a medal in the World Badminton championship after a gap of 28 years. While the two girls made news across the country, it seems the Badminton Association of India (BAI), or more precisely their official website, is completely unaware of their heroics. Even after a week, the official website is completely oblivious to the performance of the Indian contingent in London and is more bothered about publishing the internal circulars and other mundane stuff like appointment of technical officials and other committees. The attitude of those maintaining the website is no different from the overall approach of the sports administrators, who are happy holding on to their chairs rather than looking to be proactive to popularise the game. [caption id=“attachment_66161” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Shuttlers Jwala Gutta (foreground) and Ashwini Ponnappa created history last Sunday by winning a medal in the World Championship after a gap of 28 years. Reuters”]  [/caption] The last few years have been the best period for Indian badminton since the Prakash Padukone era. In fact, I would say the situation is even better than the 70s and 80s when Padukone was the lone flag-bearer of the country on the international stage. Today, there are many players who have been performing consistently at the highest level and there are at least three disciplines in which India can aim to win medals in major international tournaments. Such a situation should be an open invitation for any sports administrator to try and popularise the sport and what can be a better way than to build the marketing strategy around the players, whom the fans and even the corporate world can relate to. And the officials need not look beyond their very own Saina Nehwal, who has become a household name once she signed up with a sports management firm and the company began building her image around the “I will do anything to succeed” attitude. Thankfully, almost all the top players in the country are very articulate and can connect to the masses very easily. But somehow, the ‘shuttler’ seems to be the least important entity in the badminton set-up in India and the badminton activities that are organised during a season are more out of compulsion than with a long-term plan for the benefit of the players. The last concrete step for the development of sport was taken back in 2000, under the leadership of Padukone, when the prize money structure was introduced in the domestic circuit and a national ranking system put in place. The BAI honchos made us believe that their endeavour to host major international events in the country since 2009 was an attempt to provide the players an opportunity to grow. But instead, in the first two years, they put restrictions on Indians participating in these tournaments under the pretext that “the image of the country” will be tarnished if players lost in the initial rounds. Even after the Commonwealth Games, where India won two gold medals and a team silver, the association members indulged in the capital instead of arranging an event or a sponsorship deal as a token of appreciation for the players. But what can one expect from an association which has still not bothered to put in place a basic mechanism of providing the media with the results of domestic and international tournaments, which is very important to keep the sport and sportsperson in public memory. In these circumstances, expecting the association to promote the cause of players by building an interface between fans and sportspersons seems to be a distant dream. But the very least a player can expect is a mention of his/her achievement on the website and a word of appreciation from those running the sport.