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HITS & MISSES
Welcome choiceK DATA This writer, and many others like him will, remember the day when Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won a silver medal at the Athens Olympics shooting range in 2004. Parliament was in session that memorable morning when the news broke out. Promptly, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, a keen sports fan himself, halted proceedings in the Lok Sabha, and asked members to rise in their seats to give the army officer a standing ovation. And they did, thumping theirs desks and roaring their approval in one voice. In a Cabinet reshuffle thirteen years later the Army shooter finds himself in charge of the sports ministry.
Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore
Even before he had settled into
his seat the new man in charge was
deluged with welcome messages
from the country's sports fans.
Rathore's one-line response was
henceforth it will be sportsman
who'll be the VIP in the new system
he has in mind. One hopes he sees
to it that the outlook changes fast. Meldonium menace
Latvian drug manufacturers
are ecstatic. Meldonium, which
became famous a couple of years
ago because of its indirect
promotion by Maria Sharapova,
has become so popular and
available that junior Indian
sportspersons in remote Indian
villages are using it too!
Under-18 wrestler from
Adhiyana in Panipat district, Nisha, has been banned for four
years for consuming meldonium,
allegedly given to her by her
brother to be used as a muscle
relaxant. Still a badminton powerSaina Nehwal The 2017 World Badminton Championships at Glasgow saw Indian women deliver their best results so far, with two medals. While Saina Nehwal showed her determination, coming back from a serious knee injury to win a bronze medal, PV Sindhu displayed her best and just missed the gold after an exhilerating show against champion Nozomi Okuhara of Japanese that could have gone either way.
PV Sindhu
However, not many of us paid
attention to the men's final, where
the 23-year-old Dane Viktor Axelsen
reminded the world that Denmark is
still a power to deal with, as he
denied the legendary 33-year old Lin
Dan his sixth world championship
title. |