Shobhaa De's tweet may have hurt, but she is not entirely wrong

The Olympics has always been about winning. Even in ancient times when it all began. Commoners to emperors, everyone wanted to be victorious. In 68 CE, when Emperor Nero, better known for fiddling while Rome burnt, decided to take part in every event, the judges had little option but to declare him the champion in all, including the chariot race in which he fell off his chariot, duly hailing him as “the greatest victor of all time.” (Nothing lasts. One year later Nero was deposed and murdered, and his whole triumphant Olympiad was promptly declared invalid and struck from the official lists.) Winning mattered because it led to more than just glory on the track and field. As today, winning, in ancient Greece too, led to more than just a leafy laurel. An Athenian who won an Olympic crown could, for instance, dine free of charge in the town hall for the rest of his life. There were many other rewards — economic, social and political. In fact, so great was the prestige of Olympic victors that some of them went on to seize power in their cities and become what the Greeks called tyrants. It was only in the tail-end of the nineteenth century, when the Olympic Games were revived, that the father of the modern Olympics, the good Baron de Coubertin, introduced the lofty principle that taking part was more important than winning. But no one really bought it. The unanimous but unspoken verdict was and still is, that such sentiments were for losers, the consolation prize for those going home with little to show for their efforts. As in the past, so too today, the victor, in his or her moment of victory, is supreme. Hence, then as now, people cheated. “A competitor convicted of cheating had to pay a fine, and the money was spent on the creation and erection of a full-size, or perhaps we should say man-size, bronze statue of Zeus. By late antiquity sixteen of these ‘Zeuses’ were on display.” This and other such tidbits can be found in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books in an article entitled the ‘The Myth of the Olympics,’ based on a clutch of books relating to the evolution of the Olympics from day zero. [caption id=“attachment_2944984” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Shobhaa De. Image courtesy: CNN-News18[/caption] So, Shobhaa De is not too far wrong when she vented her frustration with an intemperate tweet on Monday evening that the “Goal of Team India at the Olympics: Rio jao, selfies lo, khaali haat wapas aao (Go to Rio, click selfies, return home empty handed). What a waste of money and opportunity.” Of course it was cruel to say so on a day when Abhinav Bindra missed out on a repeat bronze by a whisker and announced, calm and composed, “I am done, I have announced my retirement, so there is no reconsideration. I am not going to shoot again. This is it.” He looked and sounded quite like a Greek tragic hero. And our heart goes out to him. At the same time, with the men’s hockey team stumbling in the dying seconds of their match against Germany, with the much-hyped tennis stars, male and female, crashing out in their first rounds, with the highly promising women’s archery team and the much-fancied shooter Jitu Rai falling flat on their faces early on, India’s chances of taking their medals tally to double digit figures as had been expected before our sportsmen reached Rio, is receding rapidly. Even the excitement over the diminutive Dipa Karmakar is because she has made it to the finals at all, a tremendous achievement no doubt, but no one really expects her to come home even with a bronze. (Though we’ll all be delighted if we are proved wrong.) The disappointment is even greater because this was supposed to be the Olympics in which India would come into its own. With the largest ever contingent participating in more events than ever before, India was going to announce to the world that it was ready to take on China in more than just the economic arena. Instead, we may not even reach the tally of six medals we bagged in the London Olympics, our best ever. The politically correct, like Amitabh Bachchan, have already started mouthing platitudes: “Indian teams at Rio 2016 Olympics .. we are very proud of you .. do not let the disappointing losses worry or perturb you .. just to see you all up there trying your best is such a moment of pride ..! Let anyone say anything, they have no idea of the struggle you all have been through to get to where you got to …” Really? We could, of course, take heart from what an ancient Greek philosopher had to say. There are those, said Plato, who go to the Olympics to compete; there are those who go to watch; and there are those who go to buy and sell things. Of the three, he characteristically adds, the noblest are those who go to watch, for their activity is closest to pure contemplation, the highest activity of the human mind. Translated into today’s terms it would mean, they also serve who sit and watch in front of their flat-screen TVs.