Icarus, and Doping in Sports

Last night, my son and I were comparing notes on the Giro d'Italia, one of the Big 3 European cycling races, and speculating whether Chris Froome would be able to win the stage.

Waiting for race updates from the Guardian blog, I was bemused to see a spectator taunting Froome with a massive mock-up of an inhaler - Froome is fighting a legal battle for his rights to his last two racing titles over the salbutamol levels in his blood.

The next race update showed that Froome had raced down the last descent at an average of 53 Km, an hour, with a peak speed of 80 km, and was now clear in the lead for his fourth grand tour in a row, a record unbeaten since Eddie Merckx, who retired in 1978.

Thinking about drugs in sports, I turned to 'Icarus' on Netflix, a riveting 'accidental' documentary. By a bizarre set of circumstances, a playwright and stand-up comic, Bryan Fogel, found himself in contact with Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, Director of the Russian anti-doping center. It's tough to believe that Grigory is not a masterpiece of film-writing and casting, as he an engrossing, complex character, who happily helps Bryan Fogel devise a personal doping program that will beat the anti-doping system.

Meanwhile, WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, is crawling over the Russian lab, suspecting that the Russian sports system is not as clean as it claims. Grigory bails out, flies to the US, and with Bryan's help, turns whistle-blower. The New York Times carries a massive story, the WADA gets in on the act, and given the amount of data Dr. Rodchenkov is able to offer up, concludes, "I can confirm, for years, that spectators have been deceived. The desire to win medals superseded their collective moral and ethical compass, and Olympic values."

The 2016 Rio Olympics were weeks away, and WADA recommended to its parent organisation, the International Olympic Committee, that Russia be banned from the Rio games. The IOC passed the responsibility for the decision on to individual sports federations; eventually, 111 Russian athletes were banned, and 278 took part.

Given the time frame, and the paucity of data from Russia, I would assume false exclusions in both sets of Russian athletes. Having seen the film, I suspect the number of athletes on doping programs who came to Rio was significantly more than those not on drugs who stayed away.

This is probably true of most professional sports - the doping docs stay one step ahead of the anti-doping docs, and in some cases, the two are the same. Under the circumstances, it's probably a huge burden on a professional athlete to stay away from doping. Everyone's looking for a silver bullet, as long as (s)he  doesn't get caught.

Would a laissez faire approach work better - find the training regimen, needles and pills included, that sails your boat...

Flower power, at 50

The first rock musical, HAIR, opened on Broadway in 1968.

It captured the spirit of Hippiedom with the exuberance of protest, inspired lyrics, and the shock value of a nude scene. It ran on Broadway for 4 years, in London for 5, and was adapted into a film by celebrated movie director Milos Forman. A generous cousin gifted me the double album set of the soundtrack, and its songs deeply informed my teenage years.

Ten days ago, I got to see a traveling production of Hair in Munich, and I had this strange sense of traveling into the past to look at the present.

Hair was a protest against the Vietnam war, and the draft; a plea for love, peace, and clean air.

It was a paean to the solidarity of youth, to the joys of sex - of all kinds, and free love.

It was a celebration of drugs.

And, yes, to the freedom to wear your hair long.

In the context of the late 60s, the demands that Hair made of society were truly fringe. And yet, its appeal, which was quite unprecedented, could be seen as a pointer to how widely change was sought.

5 decades later, so much of that change has been wrought, particularly in the US.

Though wars may still rage across the world, annual deaths have trended vastly down since the late 60s, and Max Roser has an amazing set of graphs (https://goo.gl/images/ZtP9wY) to show the changes. And draft, a central theme in Hair, was removed in 1973.

'Free' Love, meaning sex outside of marriage, barely merits mention today; same-sex intercourse, and marriage, have wide-spread acceptance, and increasingly, legal sanction. In June 2016, President Obama dedicated the Stonewall Monument in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, to honor the LGBT rights movement. In November of that year, Kate Brown became the United States' first openly LGBT person elected Governor.

During World War II, smog in Los Angeles was so bad that people suspected a Japanese chemical attack. But the US Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1970, and progress has been rapid. California is still vulnerable to forest fires and thermal inversion, but air pollution in the US is not a major public health hazard. Meanwhile, 14 of the world's most polluted cities are in India.

And drugs? 64 % of American citizens support the legalisation of marijuana. In 29 states, you can smoke it for 'medical use'. And legal annual marijuana sales crossed 10 billion dollars in 2017.

Long hair? Man-buns is now a thing.

I don't want to make too much of a point of this, but I was really struck by how the performing arts can anticipate change, and, perhaps, just perhaps, influence it.

Memories of Migration

Madras, we called it then, when I was 6, and 7, and 8, living in a company compound fringed by a casuarina grove. To the east were the backwaters of the Adyar river. To the south, the rambling grounds of the Chettinad Palace. Always locked, a large wrought iron gate separated us from its legendary opulence, but one summer, it’s owner, MAC Chidambaram, sent word that he would be happy to have the children of our estate ride his ponies of an evening.

Jodhpurs were stitched up, riding hats were to be loaned by the stable. 7 or 8 of us walked through that open gate in a cloud of excitement large enough to cloak my indifference. The clumsy effort of clambering onto my pony did little to enthuse me. A slow trot around the paddock, a patient syce by my side, was not my idea of fun. And when we got home, my ‘bums’ hurt. But I couldn’t be the first one to cry off riding.

Munnu, already a teenager, took to the saddle with aplomb. Within a week, the syce had handed her the reins. A few days later, she and her horse were liberated from the paddock, while I still felt like a tin soldier limping around a cardboard track. Every evening, Munnu rode faster, more freely. One evening, her horse bolted. Her syce stood rooted; another mounted a pony and gave chase. Our slow parade around the paddock halted, but now both horses were out of sight. Munnu was thrown by her horse before the syce caught up. No damage done, but the gate between Firhaven and Chettinad Palace was never again opened.

Not that we missed it. Madras was going through the parochial spasms of language riots, but Firhaven was a cosmopolitan enclave. Our 8 families  were Punjabi, Gujarati, Maharashtrian Keralite, Coorg, and Konkani. On Holi, a tub with flaking enamel was rescued from the estate stores, plonked in the centre of the garden, and filled with yellow water. On Diwali, we slept through the pre-dawn Lakshmi puja of our Mylapore neighbours, and came out at night to set the skies alight with the barbaric tradition of rockets and ‘atom bombs’. For Christmas, we dressed in red and green, and sang carols in front of a Christmas tree.

My father’s employers looked after its own. We had access to a gorgeous cottage in Ootacamund, with trimmed hedges, and a cook who served up mushroom omelettes and strawberry tarts. Most evenings, my mother would pick us up from school, and drive us straight to Elliott’s beach, where the company shack was lit by lanterns, and our cold coffee stayed that way, thanks to a refrigerator that sputtered out kerosene fumes. On Sundays, we swam in the Madras Gymkhana, and snacked on fried fish and chips.

Sifting through a rich haul of memories from these years, I found only a few from school.

One is of a girl who sat at the next desk. Several weeks after I joined school, she shyly offered me a piece of dry mango pickle. It’s leathery texture was alien, but my tongue relished its coarse, crystallised salt. As it softened in my mouth, its tartness was released in an explosion of raw mango. My memory of the scene plays out like a silent movie, lit by the Madras sun, its white shafts slanting through the deep verandahs into our class. I have no memory of what words were exchanged, if any. But I know that the pickle was offered several times, and that it was the work of her grandmother.

One of the few words I remember from my time in Presentation Convent was ‘Sangam’. Addressed to me, and followed by a question mark. I had no idea what this was about, so replied with a question mark of my own.

‘You were in Sangam’. Not much of a question mark there, more a statement of fact, from a boy I met near the outhouse toilets, reeking of ammonia and damp heat. I shook my head, not so much a ‘No’, as ‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’  

He didn’t elaborate, and we passed.

A couple of days later, a girl stopped me in the corridor. “You acted in Sangam?” This I could answer. “No.” She looked at me carefully, was not convinced, but moved on.

That would make Sangam a movie, I guessed. And apparently, I looked like someone who acted in it. My parents knew nothing about movies, but one of my Punjabi ‘aunties’ did. It was a big budget movie from the house of Raj Kapoor, shot in spectacular colour. And, yes, a boy acted in it - Randhir Kapoor, Raj Kapoor’s son. “But he’s much bigger than you, betey, and you don’t really look like him. Except for the green eyes, and of course the fair skin”.

Vimla Aunty was looking at my physiognomy, but my Tamilian school mates were seeing only my phenotype. They could clearly see what many custodians of Indian history try to deny.

Some ancestor of mine had wandered away from the Scythian territory “between the Caspian Sea and Jaxartes river”. I don’t know if she came in search of peace, or he came in search of conquest. I know my forebears carried the love of adventure that courses through my veins, and animates my joy in travel.

I carry no guilt if they were ferocious in battle, or brought alien customs to a distant land. I reject the notion that cultural appropriation is a crime. I’ll take my customs from whatever appeals to my changing aesthetic, and my evolving world-view, thank you very much.