Express News Service
HANGZHOU: Pockets of the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre Stadium started chanting as one. “Yindu Jaiyou”. It roughly translates to Go India. Tejaswin Shankar was at the start of the home straight, 100m away from the finish line of the 1500m in the men’s decathlon. It was the last of the gruelling 10-event discipline and the crowd cheered him on. He was in third place and was about to win silver. His main challenger for gold — China’s Sun Qihao — was well in front after the first nine events. But Qihao was bringing up the rear in that same race. So, it was kind of surprising to see the spectators roar the Indian home. In the end, it didn’t matter as Qihao, who finished 24 seconds behind Tejaswin, took the gold.
However, broadly speaking, the reception Indian athletes have gotten from Hangzhou and elsewhere hasn’t been this warm. Tejaswin’s was the exception and not the norm. When India’s athletes walked out during the Opening Ceremony, the reception from the 80,000 capacity crowd was, to put it mildly, muted. Even before any of the athletes had kicked a ball in anger, there was escalating political tensions between the countries over the issue of non-accreditation to three players from Arunachal Pradesh (all of them were given stapled visas). So, such a response was perhaps not unexpected.
But the coldness has stretched to even when they have faced non-Chinese athletes. The best example was the women’s table tennis doubles semifinals. After stunning local favourites, Chen Meng and Wang Yidi, Ayhika Mukherjee and Sutirtha Mukherjee (unrelated) faced the North Korean duo of Suyong Cha and Sugyong Pak. For some context, table tennis fans in China don’t hope. They expect. They don’t dream that their players will win. They are certain that their players will win. That isn’t even an exaggeration. Since its inception into the Olympics programme at Seoul in 1988, there has been a total of 37 gold; China have won 32. The subtext is simple — you either win gold or you go home. Having dined on Michelin-worthy food for so long, they believe they are entitled to it.
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Coming back to the match against the North Koreans, the crowd had made it personal to see the back of the Mukherjees. There was constant cheering for the North Korean duo (all of North Korea’s athletes have been warmly received at the Games) and whenever the Indians hit a few winners, the crowd fell silent. “We have come to expect this,” was how coach Mamata Prabhu later summed up the reaction of the crowd. “The sound was louder when we played China so it was not a problem.”
Watching Chinese fans go about their business and there’s a lesson in there somewhere to spectators elsewhere. They just don’t turn against their own; if anything, they try to make the atmosphere more intimidating. At the Binjiang Gymnasium on October 1, their men’s team were in all kinds of trouble against India in the final. Trailing 0-2, there was more than just gold at stake. History and loss of bragging rights to a country that had never tasted gold in this sport at this level.
Giant-clappers were summoned, inflatable sticks were banged against each other and ‘Jaiyou’ was chanted on repeat, like a broken record. While India’s players would have been used to such an atmosphere — some of them have played in China before — the wall of noise can still be disconcerting. South Korea’s Woojin Jang, who faced China’s Fan Zhendong (a table tennis God around these parts) in the final, was left shaken by the experience of having to shut out the crowd who were baying for his blood. “I was afraid,” he would say in the mixed zone after taking a game off Zhendong. “To play him in China is tougher… in an atmosphere like this.”
Some of the cricketers, who are currently here, left the men’s team final before China started clawing their way back into the encounter. One of them said: “the atmosphere was nuts”. This cricketer has played in front of full crowds but found the noise level “up there”. As soon as Kidambi Srikanth, who had a game point, squandered it, the crowd did their thing. Before long, the hosts had won 3-2.
Some Chinese, though, travelled to watch Indians. One of them went to the far-flung cricket stadium to catch Smriti Mandhana. He had even made a poster, calling her a “Goddess”.
On Thursday, there was another high-profile clash between the two countries. In the semifinals of the women’s hockey (an Olympic qualifier), the hosts beat India 4-0, another inescapable theme of the Games most times there has been a direct clash in a key game.
China have come out on top.
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