The Rio Olympics from the diary of an ardent Cricket fan in India

14th August 2016, 11:30 pm: Thousands of Indians like me were glued to Star Sports on their TV sets. And no, we were not watching 'cricket', which pretty much gets most of the public attention when it comes to 'sports' in India. We were into a game called Gymnastics, a game whose existence was not even realised by many Indians before something special happened.

Just a week ago, a young 23-year old girl from probably the remotest part of our nation, Dipa Karmakar, had become the toast of the entire country when she became the first gymnast ever to qualify for the finals of the most coveted event in the world of sports, the Olympics. In a country where the infrastructure for Gymnastics is not as developed as it is for other sports, this certainly was a humongous achievement.

I read somewhere that this golden girl practised on the seat of a scooter. I don't know how authentic the information is, but nevertheless, this girl's achievement surely left me awestruck.

Anyway, getting back to the match, words like Tsukuhara and Produnova in the commentary sounded all Greek to me as this was the first ever Gymnastics event that I was watching (and I assume that most Indians had not heard of these terms before the qualification rounds of the same event). But still, we were waiting for our golden girl to take centre stage and perform her heart out.

On a day when three of India's biggest medal hopes (Sania Mirza, Saina Nehwal and Indian men's hockey team) crashed out of the Olympics, our hopes rested on the shoulders of this young girl.

And here she came, 6th by serial number amongst the 8 finalists. She went for her first attempt and though I could not comprehend a lot about how she performed, but judging by the huge roar of applause in the crowd, I could sense that she had done reasonably well. And then her second attempt was the much-spoken-about Produnova.

This attempt of hers amazed not only me but also the commentators and the crowd present over there. The grace with which she accomplished that left me stunned. There was a glittering smile on her face at the end of her second attempt, which was a clear indicator that she had given her best.

Dipa had a reasonably good score and on the basis of that, she was placed second on that list, which meant that the only chance of her not winning the medal was that both the remaining contestants outscored her. Now this was a nail biting moment for those thousands of hopeful souls who were waiting for their country to secure its first medal. And there could not have been a better occasion than the independence day of the country to get that.

We desperately wanted at least one of those two (if not both) to falter. But destiny had something else in store and in the final rankings, Dipa Karmakar was placed 4th, missing the illustrious medal by less than a whisker.

Although a billion hearts were shattered, but all those hearts know that she is the real star of tomorrow. She might have missed out on a medal today, but she will definitely win scores of such medals in future.

Now we need to ponder upon this situation in our country. Although I am a die-hard cricket enthusiast, but I was forced to think in this direction: Do we lay too much of emphasis on cricket? Do we neglect other sports to such an extent that the Government doesn’t even consider it worthy enough to spend on them? And is it because of this neglect that despite having great potential talents in the country, we are still not able to get the desired results in the medals tally?

We need to build up the environment around ourselves for other games to proliferate and prosper. Only then we can have a medals tally like that of any top class nation.

Let us hope we get to see more Dipa Karmakars at the international platform, because looking at the Indian tricolour amongst the eight flags raised during the Finals certainly gave me goose bumps. Long live Dipa Karmakar! Long live Indian sports!