By around 1996, Andrew Jennings’ New Lords of the Rings had been translated into 12 languages and a television documentary based on it screened in some 30 countries. Not India though. Right now our big boys lick their chops for 2036, when we could be staging the Ahmedabad Olympics at the huge stadium named after the country’s prime minister. In our dull and drab past, India’s sporting dreams didn’t extend farther than cut-price continental shows which we fussed over a good deal. It was a world away from the ivory tower Jennings wrote about.
The investigative reporter had pulled out all the stops in his book, relishing telling people how Olympic gold medals could be bought if you knew the right people and how positive dope tests could be hushed up. India knew little of the book and probably not too many copies of it were available here either. Blindsided then and awestruck today in an India with a liberalised economy, we count on Olympian triumphalism becoming the flavour of the season for a long time, up till the magic moment when, in a blaze of feel-good euphoria for us, the show gets going, if it does.
IOC president Thomas Bach has assured India that ego-puncturing memories of the sordid organisation of the New Delhi Commonwealth Games won’t stand in the way of India landing the Olympic prize, while telling the world that the India of today is, well, science fiction stuff. That implies a pat on the back, the go-for-it green light. And there won’t perhaps be any NOlympics inspired disruption here, probably another feature of sport’s big story we are innocent of, one that eludes the India media though it never is too far from wherever an edition of the Summer Games is staged.
Los Angeles in 2028 could see a lot of the movement’s activities: what Rudyard Kipling said about the essential East-West differences and the twain never meeting being perhaps very true. NOlympics activists were there all right in Tokyo, the last time the show was put on for our delectation, and they would be fetching up lending the competition an argumentative, disputatious touch for Los Angeles. NOlympics resents how sport plays havoc with the cities where Olympics are held.
It says the IOC won’t and can’t plan and execute an ethical event as the point for those in charge is the access to capital and conditions which allow them to move the Games from their original objective of innocent entertainment, steering them towards greed and corruption. Jennings said that decades ago and India would only now get to know the nitty-gritty of the process. But even as we gloat over India coming of age, part of the show, the NOlympics bit, could remain a sealed book. Morally blind Big Ones have long seen it though and there are a few of them everywhere.