EDITORIAL: How F1 pulled off in India while the FIH could not in India?

The Big Day of Indian Sports is just a day away. India will be proud to join the biggies in the world sports tomorrow.

The Budh International Circuit, located in the suburb of Delhi, will witness India’s First ever Formula 1 race

The Authorities in the world of car racing have done it. They found that a vibrant and popular sport such as Formula 1 cannot miss out an emerging superpower like India.

The same way the Federation Internationale de Hockey (FIH) thought in the late 2000s with regard to the globalization and commercialization of field hockey sport.

The onerous task of laying the track, testing events and other related ones were held in clock wise precision, so we have tomorrow the great F1 on our soils.

In terms of preparation, investment, getting approvals from various government agencies, the task before the F1 people were huge, very huge compared to hockey.

Yet within two years’ time all the tasks have been accomplished without much fuss.
So, we are today on the edge of excitement waiting for the D-Day, and there is an Indian team, till recently known as Force India, now Sahara Force India.

Sahara, as we all know, is one of the leading promoters of Indian sports, their involvement includes sponsorship of both men and women senior and junior national hockey teams.

We are not interested here to talk about Sahara but the saga of FIH and India which almost flopped while F1 is set to take off. The success of which may change the sports scenario in the country.

When the more complex and more capital intensive sport like F1 can easily take place, why could not somewhat low profile and less commercilised sport like hockey go on high despite the fact the world governing body wanted it in India.

Why F1 is successful in India, and why the FIH failed?

When India can host World Cup, Commonwealth Games and why not a small and inconsequential tournament like Champions Trophy?

Not only that, all the FIH proposals aiming at Indian hockey development is now on the verge of collapse. Why so? Where do things go wrong?

Here lies the lesson. The professionalism of both the global body and the host.
While in F1’s case there has been an excellent synergy between the world body and the promoter here, it was not so with respect to hockey.

The F1 bosses came to India, met same Suresh Kalmadi, whom FIH considered a messiah not long ago, and wanted to have the F1 done with the collaboration of Indian Olympic Association. Within six months, they found the IOA is not a body they can do business with. They went private. The promoter of today’s F1 is a private body not the IOA.

This is exactly the difference. Whatever name you take, IOA or Hockey India, IHF or whatever, the people who control these bodies are not professionals, they call themselves honorary officials, who by acts of omission and commission do disservice to the sports.
So, F1 people understood the dynamics of Indian sports, which should be obvious to anybody who work with Indian sports officials even for short time.

The FIH went overboard first and allotted many tournaments for a four-year cycle. They now start withdrawing one by one. The main reason why FIH’s thinking, though very solid on basics and concept, failed was in implementation.

The FIH could have adopted the F1 model, which is about working with private people and get things done. They had men and money power too.

The FIH on the other hand got into the politics. It wanted to micro-manage things. It wanted to control from small things to big ones. By all means it got into petty politics of Indian sports which it could neither dictate nor mature enough to accept.

The FIH definitely took sides openly, picking and choosing persons on its whim and fancy. And it also wittingly or unwittingly interfered in the legal battles. This made the Sports Ministry a hapless onlooker.

When a competition came for it in the form of World Series Hockey, with legal experts and money power, the FIH panicked. Its reaction to WSH was laughable. Instead of tackling it with matching program (when ICL came the BCCI came out with much better version called IPL, and it worked), it came out with Hitler type Sanctioned and Unsanctioned events.

Its here the FIH’s otherwise meaningful India policy took a turn for worse. FIH need not have desired to control a domestic tournament in an another country.

The WSH, despite its name, is a domestic affair. The FIH should have ignored it. It did not, instead it started what could be termed as blackmailing what with withdrawing tournaments which it allotted on its own.

Thus, it made itself a butt of joke. Allotting and re-allotting tournaments is FIH’s right. And its prestige. By going overboard one day, and then regretting later on another day, these vagaries do not behove FIH of a global body.

The FIH should look at F1 bosses who kept amateurish organizations at a distance while giving impetus to their sports. They respected their sport, did not use it as a mean to achieve something else.

That is professionalism which somewhat definitely the FIH lacked in its dealing with India.
It should have left internal matters of India to India and stuck to its sports. Then its thoughts would have taken shape, as much as F1’s.