India, Once a Field-Hockey Power,Watches From Home

MUMBAI — Germany’s victory over host nation China Monday morning in the opening of the men’s field hockey tournament at the Olympic Green Hockey Stadium marked a major milestone: The sport made its Olympic debut 100 years ago at the 1908 London Games.

But while the sport basks in the Olympic spotlight, one team will be conspicuous by its absence: India.

Cricket is a religion in India but field hockey is the national sport. And India is the most successful Olympic hockey team in history. From 1928 to 1956 — India’s transformation from a British colony to the world’s largest democracy — the Indian men’s team won six hockey golds in a row. It won again in 1964 and 1980 and the country’s tally of eight gold medals is more than twice as many as the next most successful men’s teams, Pakistan and Britain, with three each.

Now the sport in India is in tatters.

Earlier this year, the Indian men’s hockey team failed to qualify for the Games for the first time ever, a blow as unthinkable as the U.S. men’s basketball team missing the Olympics.

Soon after, a local television station showed video footage of the secretary of the Indian Hockey Federation, the body that oversees the sport here, accepting a bribe to include a particular player on the national team. The secretary resigned under pressure from the International Hockey Federation, which threatened to bar India from hosting the Hockey World Cup, scheduled for 2010.

In response, the Indian Olympic Association sacked the president of the Indian Hockey Federation and has moved to replace the federation itself with a new body called Hockey India.

The president, Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, is a former state police chief well-known for his harsh but successful tactics in suppressing an insurgency in the state of Punjab in the early 1990s. He has challenged both moves and a court hearing is scheduled for Aug. 29.

It is an ignominious fall from grace for a sport that was introduced in India and elsewhere in the British Empire by the British Army in the 1800s. Today, Australia, another former colony, is the world’s top-ranked team and favorite to retain the gold medal it won four years ago. Eight players from its successful Athens team have made the trip to Beijing. The other three teams tipped to make the semifinals are the Netherlands (silver medalists in Athens), Germany (bronze) and Spain. Asia’s best chance of a medal lies with South Korea, currently ranked fifth in the world. India has fallen to ninth — two slots below its great rival, Pakistan, whose team is in Beijing.

The absence of India at the sport’s premier event is felt most keenly by former Olympians who were part of the glory days of Indian hockey. “I am not going to Beijing to watch Olympic hockey,” Balbir Singh Sr., a triple gold-medalist, wrote in an email. “Our team’s absence there would be demoralizing for me.”

Instead he’ll tune in on television. So will Dhanraj Pillay, who played in four Olympics and is arguably the best player India has produced over the past 25 years. As a lover of hockey, he will “definitely be watching” despite “feeling the pain that India is my country and not participating in the Olympics.”

The sport’s rapid decline in India began about 15 years ago, around the time Mr. Gill took the sport’s top administrative job. As cricket and tennis have gained in popularity and attracted big sponsorship money as well as new generations of players and fans, hockey’s governing body failed to put in place grass-roots development programs to maintain the sports’ appeal. At the top level, it didn’t convert Indian players to training on artificial turf — with its truer bounce and quicker pace — on which international hockey competitions are played.

Mr. Gill blames a lack of government support for hockey’s ills. He says in an interview that the cost of building turf stadiumswas beyond the ability of the federation and the government failed to step in and fill the gap. He doesn’t even plan on watching the Olympic tournament unless “it is at a convenient time.”

FIELD HOCKEY IN THE U.S.

U.S. Field Hockey doesn’t boast a glorious history. But it has had its moments. As the host country in Atlanta in 1996, the U.S. women won a bronze medal. The women also qualified for Beijing and on Sunday tied the powerful Argentines, 2-2. Huge.
Now, about that U.S. men’s bronze in 1932, at the Los Angeles Games. So there were only three teams in the tournament (India, gold; Japan, silver). So the U.S. lost both games by a combined 33-3. So they lost to India 24-1. They came, they played, they got the bronze. An Olympic medal is an Olympic medal.
–Steve McKee