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  • Olympics

    I'd love to be able to put this into the sporting thread but so far this years olympics has been far more political than sporting and we have yet to see the opening ceremonies. Right now it looks like athletes from India can't carry their nations flag. That is a travesty. Its a messed up world we live in.





    Y! SPORTS
    The Olympics are never free from political influence and associations, but in India, political infighting has literally cost the nation's athletes the chance to compete under their own flag.

    India's membership in the International Olympic Committee has been frozen since December 2012, when the IOC learned that India elected officials accused of corruption to its national Olympic committee. The Indian Olympic Association will hold new elections, but those elections will not be held until after the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

    [Photos: Team USA podium fashion]

    As a result, India's athletes must compete as independents, and will enter the Opening Ceremony under a generic Olympic flag, not the nation's flag as shown above in 2012.

    Naturally, and justifiably, Indian athletes are outraged. "It is a sad and embarrassing situation that Indian sport has been put in," Shiva Keshavan, a luger who will compete in his fifth Olympics, told a local newspaper. "People around the world know about the failure of our systems and about corruption and bad governance in sports. The essence of the Olympic Games is to 'represent' and I feel it is shameful and pathetic for all of us Indians that athletes may not walk under the Indian flag."

    India had been warned in December that its athletes faced the possibility of being classified as independent if the nation did not hold elections before February 7, the date of the Opening Ceremony. The IOA decided at a December meeting to hold the elections two days later, on February 9.

    Why not simply change the date and move it a few days earlier? That's thinking about solving the problem, not preserving the process. "The decision to have elections on February 9 was taken at a special general body meeting last month," an IOA source told the AFP. "We would have had to call another general body meeting to change the dates."

    "We have had discussions and it was mutually agreed that we must not take decisions in haste," a source told India Today. "So it was decided not to alter the dates for the elections. [Changing the election date] may allow people to exploit legal loopholes in the decision and jeopardize the polls again."

    So rather than alter its bureaucratic procedures, India's Olympic committee has opted to embarrass its athletes, its nation and itself in front of the entire world. Olympic spirit apparently means very different things to different people.
    Removing a single turd from the cesspool doesn't make any difference.

  • #2
    Originally posted by bonehead View Post
    India's membership in the International Olympic Committee has been frozen since December 2012, when the IOC learned that India elected officials accused of corruption to its national Olympic committee. The Indian Olympic Association will hold new elections, but those elections will not be held until after the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
    From what I read above, India had over a year to set things right. Am I surprised at this? Not in the least. I've come to the realization that India is dysfunctional. That said, I wish Indian athletes good fortune at Sochi.
    sigpic

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    • #3
      Yet another indicator of India dysfunction...

      India ranks near bottom of nuclear material security index
      sigpic

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Minskaya View Post
        From what I read above, India had over a year to set things right. Am I surprised at this? Not in the least. I've come to the realization that India is dysfunctional. That said, I wish Indian athletes good fortune at Sochi.
        I'll skip the generalizations about India (you are less likely to get accused of racism & a 'colonial mentality' than me), but I do know from my beloved sport of Cricket that India's record on sports administration is poor. Corruption, petty thuggery, political game playing & empire building have been par for the course. Not restricted to India, but certainly present there. Not surprised by this.
        sigpic

        Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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        • #5
          Mehh they ain't missing out on much.
          Banned Substances Claim an Outsize Role in Athletics in India

          By REBECCA BYERLYJAN. 2, 2014

          View slide show|11 Photos
          Enrico Fabian for The New York Times

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          http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/sp...ef=sports&_r=0

          PATIALA, India — The crumbling Old Moti Bagh Palace houses the National Institute of Sports, the training ground for India’s best athletes. One sweltering spring afternoon, the sprinter Ashwini Akkunji ran laps around its sprawling grounds, past broken fountains, a murky pool and monkeys that occasionally charged people with bared teeth. She and the palace, once home to Patiala’s royal family, had seen better days.

          A gold medalist in the 4x400-meter relay and the 400 hurdles at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, Akkunji was a national hero and inspired awe in other athletes here. But eight months after those victories, Akkunji and five of her relay teammates tested positive for steroids and were suspended from competition for two years.

          Athletes around the world have had their careers marred by doping, but Indian athletes, with easy access to legal steroids and limited knowledge about their consequences, lead the world in suspensions for performance-enhancing drug use.

          Nearly 500 have tested positive for banned substances since 2009, when India’s National Anti-Doping Agency, known as NADA, became fully functional. In 2012 alone, 178 Indians were barred from competition. Russia has had the second-highest number of suspensions, with more than 260 athletes barred since 2009.

          At the same time, Russia, with a population of 143 million, has had great international athletic success, and India, a nation of 1.2 billion, has underperformed. India has won only 26 medals in the 113 years it has competed in the Olympic Games. Russia has earned 482 Olympic medals since it began competing as the Russian Federation in the 1994 Winter Games.

          “India cannot provide proper nutrition, training or medical care for its national athletes,” said Dr. Mohan Chandran, president of the Indian Federation of Sports Medicine. “So, of course, we are decades behind in our knowledge on doping.”

          But John Fahey, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said India had come a long way in its efforts to catch up with international standards. The increase in testing and the enforcement of WADA rules could be one reason so many athletes are caught.

          They learn to cut corners early, said Rehan Khan, a steroid supplier in New Delhi for more than 20 years.

          “Some of my biggest clients are the coaches of junior athletes,” Khan said. “Most of my clients understand what they are buying. They know they will get fast results, so it is worth the risks. If they don’t buy from me, they can just as easily order the steroids online.”

          The salaries of coaches who train junior and national athletes are often dependent on the performance of their charges. Some of these coaches are not familiar with increasingly stringent doping tests; others believe that the drugs’ effect is worth the gamble.

          “Whether it is a junior meet or university meet, you see syringes all over the track,” said Ashwini Nachappa, a former track star who is the president of Clean Sports India, an organization that fights corruption in athletics. “Nobody has given it a thought. The onus lies in the training center to start education programs and start randomly testing the kids so that there is fear.”

          She said the Indian government should also stop hiring coaches from former Soviet bloc countries that have a long history of using performance-enhancing drugs.

          A Way Out of Poverty

          Most Indian athletes do not expect million dollar contracts or lucrative sponsorships. Careers in medicine or engineering are more respected. Yet for the tens of thousands who come from impoverished backgrounds and vie for positions on national teams, successful performances can ensure government jobs that will provide financial security for them and their families.

          Akhil Kumar, a boxer who competed in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, said he felt like a test animal at the National Institute of Sports. His coaches and doctors, he said, did not have the resources and experience to help him with injuries and often made his situation worse.

          “I know about doping because I have been in this sport for a long time and have educated myself,” said Kumar, 32, who is aiming for a comeback in the 2016 Olympics and works as a police officer, a common government job for athletes. “The only way the next generation of athletes is going to have that knowledge is if they take it upon themselves to get educated, and people like me reach back and teach them.”

          Chandran, who is also a member of NADA’s disciplinary board, said the agency needed to do more to inform athletes about the risks of taking steroids because they are responsible for what they put in their bodies. But many Indians do not have the resources to research the contents of their supplements or to have them tested.

          “In India we are taught to never question the authority of our coaches, who are the center of our lives,” the track star Akkunji said.

          Akkunji, whose suspension ended in July, is competing internationally and aiming for the 2016 Olympics. She and her teammates contended that they never knowingly took steroids. Akkunji said their Ukrainian coach had given them tainted nutritional supplements.

          Dr. Laxman Singh Ranawat, the executive director of the National Institute of Sports until he retired in October, defended its training methods while acknowledging, “There may be a few cases of doping in India, but those athletes were given the drugs by their foreign coaches.”

          Less than a mile from Ranawat’s office, the streets are lined with billboards showing bodybuilders flexing their muscles. They advertise steroids, available at pharmacies across India, where there is virtually no regulation of over-the-counter drugs.

          The most common drug Indians test positive for is norandrosterone, a steroid that has been prohibited in sports for more than 30 years, according to The British Journal of Sports Medicine.

          A month’s supply of banned substances can cost as little as $5 to $10, and some pills are only 25 cents, said Raj Makhija, the chief executive of Smart Brands in New Delhi, one of India’s few suppliers of authentic health food supplements.
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          6 days ago

          I am no fan of Serena Williams, but that is a baseless accusation. In the UK you would be used for slander.

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          Nutritional supplements from abroad are subject to high import taxes. Makhija said that imported whey protein and recovery drinks could cost $60 to $150 a month, depending on the brand and serving sizes, and that a lack of regulation had led to the rampant sale of counterfeit products.

          One of the athletes Makhija sponsors is Yogeshwar Dutt, an Olympic bronze medalist in men’s 60-kilogram freestyle wrestling at the 2012 London Games.

          “You know if you take steroids, you can put on muscle and get a good performance fast,” Dutt said as other wrestlers crowded into his room to talk with Makhija at a training camp in Haryana. “A lot of young athletes take the easy route. Unless they are sponsored like we are, it would be difficult for them to even afford quality supplements.”

          Pushing for Change

          Cheema Palwinder, a former Asian Games champion weight lifter, knows the challenges of being an athlete in India. Now obese with painful joints, he looks a decade older than his 33 years.

          “In my day there was not so much testing,” said Palwinder, the superintendent of police in Punjab, where he presides over a dusty agricultural town with fields full of tractors and bullock carts. “When I was competing on the international level, I learned about steroids from athletes who came from countries with more sophisticated doping programs. They showed me what drugs would stay in my system and which ones would quickly flush out.”

          Palwinder said he was trying to educate coaches, athletes and their parents about the effects of performance-enhancing drugs. But given the magnitude of the problem, he said, it is probably a losing battle.

          Rajkumar Merathia, a boxing coach at the National Institute of Sports, is more hopeful.
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          “Sports in India is much better than it was 20 years ago,” Merathia said as he shouted commands to a teenage girl who traded bloody noses with her male opponent on a grass field. “We are starting athletes out younger, and we are winning more medals than we used to.”

          The Sports Authority of India, part of a government ministry, supports tens of thousands of athletes with a minimal full-time permanent staff: three sports medicine doctors, six physiotherapists, three physiologists, two psychologists and one nutritionist, Chandran said by email. Even the best athletes feel shortchanged.

          Om Prakash Singh was dejected and depressed after placing 19th in the shot-put at the London Olympics. He returned to the National Institute of Sports, which offered limited medical care.

          “It’s so difficult to adjust to training in India after training in Europe and the United States,” Singh, 26, said after a workout as he folded his 6-foot-7-inch, 304-pound body into a blue plastic barrel filled with ice water. “Look at our facilities. If someone offered you steroids and said you would not get caught, wouldn’t you take them too?”
          To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Minskaya View Post
            Yet another indicator of India dysfunction...

            India ranks near bottom of nuclear material security index
            And does this have anything to do with the Olympics or are you going to continue to go out of your way and find news article that shows how dysfunctional India is? Why don't you save us the trouble and start a thread on how dysfunctional India is to engage your predilections and save us the trouble from having to read your thread once we know what it is?

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            • #7
              If we're going to have a discussion about the Olympics, let's have one on Bobby Ryan being left out of the U.S. Hockey Team, and we're going to beat the Russians on their home ice! :D

              (in all seriousness, expect a come down for the Americans from their 2010 silver)

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              • #8
                Originally posted by rj1 View Post
                If we're going to have a discussion about the Olympics, let's have one on Bobby Ryan being left out of the U.S. Hockey Team, and we're going to beat the Russians on their home ice! :D

                (in all seriousness, expect a come down for the Americans from their 2010 silver)
                Hockey? Thats nothing. Figure skating is where nations hang their pride and the judging is not biassed at all………….

                Even on the computer I can't say that with a straight face.
                Removing a single turd from the cesspool doesn't make any difference.

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                • #9
                  Winter Olympics suck anyways.
                  To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by bonehead View Post
                    Curling is where nations hang their pride
                    Fixed
                    No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                    To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

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                    • #11
                      Originally posted by troung View Post
                      Winter Olympics suck anyways.
                      Bite your tongue.

                      In the Winter Olympics, the women actually look like women.

                      In the Summer Olympics, they look like men with wigs on.

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                        Fixed
                        As much as curling is a…for lack of a better term... "sport", at least the judges can't be biased about the scoring like they are in figure skating. I am convinced that events like figure skating should be regulated to "entrainment purposes only" and no scoring/medals should be involved.
                        Removing a single turd from the cesspool doesn't make any difference.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by bonehead View Post
                          As much as curling is a…for lack of a better term... "sport", at least the judges can't be biased about the scoring like they are in figure skating. I am convinced that events like figure skating should be regulated to "entrainment purposes only" and no scoring/medals should be involved.
                          They are a counterpart to rhythmic gymnastics on summer Olympics. Waiting the day for Zumba on ice to become Olympics sport.
                          No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                          To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                          Comment


                          • #14

                            Nearly 500 have tested positive for banned substances since 2009, when India’s National Anti-Doping Agency, known as NADA, became fully functional. In 2012 alone, 178 Indians were barred from competition. Russia has had the second-highest number of suspensions, with more than 260 athletes barred since 2009.



                            Pffffft!

                            According to this study over 1.3 million Americans have used PEDs!!!!

                            Performance Enhancing Drugs


                            USA!!! USA!!!!
                            “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
                            Mark Twain

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                            • #15
                              According to this study over 1.3 million Americans have used PEDs!!!!
                              It's an IQ test anyways.

                              Bite your tongue.
                              Figure skating, skiing and such are not sports. And no real American watches hockey.
                              To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                              Comment

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