"Can". Three letter word. Doesn't have a big personality. Slang for toilet. Painted by Andy Warhol. Worth five points in Scrabble. Then you look again. “Can” has muscle. It means having the ability, the competence, the conviction. It’s knowing “how to do it”. It is having the “power to”. This is worth more points than you can estimate in competition. “Can” is what the outspoken and ironic Abhinav Bindra is helping India with. He is not the first to dismantle the barriers, because even in the 1920s and 1930s, an army officer called Dhyan Chand and his cronies called Leslie Hammond, Feroze Khan and Jaipal Singh Munda were telling the world that India could do magic with the stick ball. But Bindra, with the heartbeat of an undertaker and the determination of an assassin, won India's first individual Olympic gold in 2008, and it should hang in a sports museum like tape proof. This is what Indians can do. But to understand “can,” one must first encounter “can’t.” I have to go through a century of struggle or however long it took. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay You need to remember all the baggage of doubt that athletes had to carry around. I have to remember everyone who tried, who didn't know any better, who was intimidated but fought on, who had no history to wear as armor, who lived in an India before Google, when 400m training programs could not simply be downloaded from the Internet and so Milkha Singh had to go and meet Charles Jenkins, the world's best 400m runner, at the 1956 Olympics and, through an interpreter , in broken English, ask him about his training program. And he got it. One sweltering morning in 2018, Rahul Dravid sat in his garden, as unyielding as the trees that form a canopy, and talked about small things. All these little pieces that make up a culture, that change a sporting people, that bring conviction, that create a world of “can”. His sons were there and the eldest, Samit, plays cricket and when he wants a bat, he asks for an SG one. Made in India. Meerut, to be precise, in the heart of chaotic northern Uttar Pradesh, where even overseas cricketers come to collect their bats. On the surface this seems inconsequential, but in the past, bats came mainly from England. Names like Gray-Nicolls and Duncan Fearnley, names you said with enough respect. Phoren maal, bhai. They were superior bats and so, by inference, so were their cricketers. Belief comes in small pieces, like 3,000-piece puzzles put together over time. The smallest thing is a precious piece. Young cricketers from a millennial generation have agents and plan their professional careers, but once upon a time, a simple call from a sponsor had meaning beyond money. "If Reebok sponsored you," Dravid says, "that mattered. That meant they believed in you. That meant I had to be good." But until players and teams put all those pieces together, the inferiority is an easy coat to wear. My goodness, Dravid remembers thinking, after seeing the drills the South Africans were doing in the 1990s, where are they? How can we? People are snickering now, these guys were so dhila, so gentle, but this wasn't an India of cricketers with designer dark glasses and seven credit cards getting into English hotelsas if they own them and they can. It was another India, less impetuous, which still found its confidence, its place, its voice, and many of us going abroad in the 1980s carried this hesitation of the untraveled and the uncertain, armed with our thin packets of precious traveler's checks. , packets of sambar as a rescue, unsure of our accents, asking if “veg milega?” (Is vegetarian food available?), dressed in clothes a few fashion cycles old, walking past the shops on Oxford Street in a daze. Athletes reflect the society they live in, and during those years, they too were bullied. They were looking at everyone's fancy equipment, gyms, facilities, trainers, sneakers and tracksuits while eating a scientifically approved diet of McDonald's hamburgers because it was the cheapest place to eat and shrink inside. Confidence all curled up. How can you beat them if you're not one of them? If sport is practiced in the mind, this is also where suspicion of one's own talent rests. In any case, Indians were not conditioned to express their ambition. No one wanted to look too big for boots they didn't even have. Well, not the nice gifts their friends sometimes received from abroad. On the plane to England in 1996 for his first Test tour, Dravid was all freshly shaven enthusiasm, wondering if a series could be won, until a senior, carrying the wisdom of practice , says, "Let's try to win a test." Remember the Titans is a film about the semi-miraculous, it was the truly humble world of the Indian athlete. It's not that Asian athletes couldn't win medals at the Commonwealth Games or score centuries at the Lord's, but they were understandably inhibited at crucial times. "In sports," Dravid explained, "the margins are so small that any inferiority is magnified under pressure. And so, if things got tough, we didn't have enough history behind us to show that we could achieve it. “The story has weight. we cannot calculate, a weight that we cannot evaluate, an effect that is impossible to estimate. Bindra, at 18, went to America to train at the US Olympic training center in Colorado Springs and his education was not only about position but also psychology. India had won eight Olympic gold medals until then, all in hockey; America had over a thousand gold medals and hundreds of heroes and it was as if the sporting world was there just so they could conquer it. This place was the Kingdom of Can and in Bindra's book, A Shot At History, he describes this: "Confidence was like a birthright here and they approached the Games without the cynicism that athletes are forced to breathe every day in sporting India. Americans sincerely believe that they are the best and luckiest country. They weren't going to the Olympics in awe and contentment just to try, they were going to the Olympics to succeed, to make history, to remember. a collective, and I was impressed by the importance they placed on the team and its construction. Great athletes littered the halls. Hey, this is Apollo Ohno, the legendary skater, this is Matthew Emmons, the future Olympic hero, this is a. Michael Phelps, younger, but who has not yet asserted himself. Their vitality amazed me and, more importantly, infected me with a kind of osmotic effect. Watch, copy, learn, immerse yourself. If you train with them and beat them, the discovery is magnificent. and immediate: I can be great too. “India had some of its own history, some legends, some advanced scouts. But no one had won individual Olympic gold, no paths had been blazed, no culture of 'power' created. People used to say, this writer too: a billion people, no individual gold medal For Indians it was a terrible lament and for foreigners a useful insult, but in truth, in one? struggling nation full of difficulties, where space was scarce, fields few, coaches scarce and sports science in its infancy, academics essential, parents disapproving, how many people could actually play a sport. and then practice it competitively? It was still far from a billion It was not only the insufficient facilities and models, but also the lack of effort of the Indians. apathy. Back home, people made fun of athletes who went to the big Games to go shopping, which was unfair, cynical, but not entirely wrong. Badminton star Pullela Gopichand, a driven man who could have been a stern and dedicated sergeant major. a past life, said bluntly: "A lot of teams (in the past) were not in sync with what was happening in the sports world. They were happy to be there, taking pictures and trading "The athletes had earned their place there, but some didn't see any value. higher than participation. Victory – and it was not without meaning – was about achieving this. "Back then, 5 or 10 percent of them," Gopichand said, "were actually thinking about winning a medal. Today, about 90 percent do whatever they can to win a medal. May -maybe they won't win a medal, but everyone is disappointed that they didn't." Previously, athletes shrugged their shoulders after defeat, now they suffer. The fear needs a few visits to rub off. The first time you go to Lord's or Wimbledon you may be soothed by the history. All these boards, these statues, these names, this legend. The second time around, you may recognize that the wickets, even at Lord's, are only 22 meters apart and that the net at Wimbledon is the same height as that of your local club in Chennai. But in the old days, Gopichand says, athletes barely traveled, maybe two tournaments a year abroad, maybe four, and that wasn't enough to find the necessary comfort, to understand that the poster on your Mur was not a masked hero but just another nervous human. Gopichand said, “People idolized them so much that they couldn’t beat them. » But there were always exceptions. Always people like Sunil Gavaskar, Ramanathan Krishnan, Prakash Padukone, Michael Ferreira, always exceptions whose desire blunted fear, whose motivation took over insecurity. Who forgets Gavaskar against the West Indies teaching us the difference between size and stature? Who forgets Padukone and her wrist sewn with silk thread? They are not as afraid as the others. Why weren't you intimidated, I asked Gopichand, the All-England champion in 2001, and he replied: "I blindly believed I was going to win. I just didn't like losing." , no matter who it was. It was personal for me on the ground." These people are the ones who chart the path, who find the road, who give courage, who restore confidence. This is also who Bindra is.Forget all those hideous clichés about “do-it-for-India” because the athlete can only think of himself. Under the pressure of competition, it is difficult enough to advance your talent, let alone win the nations. You do not play with a hymn in mind but according to the score which is your project for the day. But when you win, for yourself, for your parents, for your coaches, for those who helped you, the medal becomes an inadvertent gift to your nation. Bindra doesn't look at his 2008 Olympic gold medal and he doesn't even really know where it is most of the time. But the medal is really for India, a circular representation of the journey he has lived and endured for years. A proof medallion. An Indian can do it. Bindra is not a star because shooters never are. He's too calm to be famous, too serious to be casual. But he has something more important: he is an evangelist. Not to shoot but to suffer, not for gold medals but to hold a dream tightly in your fist and never let go. He's a reluctant man with a great story who eventually learned to stand on podiums and tell strangers incredibly honest stories about what he was missing. Bindra's great gift is to demystify success and rid it of all exaggeration. "Sometimes with great achievement," he said, "there can be an element of aura or excessive admiration that is counterproductive. This alleviates the deep desperation to win and the desire to win. get for yourself." He wants to show that it's inside. a true aspiration of imperfect people, not an empty and useless miracle. When he started speaking after Beijing 2008, to schools, conclaves, colleges, businesses, he didn't talk so much about his weaknesses because he was still a competitive athlete who needed to maintain a strong self-image and was therefore unable to fully reveal himself. But then, as his career came to an end, he started to peel off, strip down and show people his full personality. "I talked about my vulnerabilities. I talked about my insecurities. I talked about how I was a nervous wreck. I talked about how I was a perfectionist for whom nothing was never enough. I was like everyone else and I just worked, worked, worked I persevered." Even when he met athletes, he was like that because his vulnerabilities reassured them. Oh wait, he's just like us. "I tell them I'm an average athlete who won because of a damn mentality. If I can do it, there's no reason why you can't do it." And while athletes s warmed up with him, now linked to him by this umbilical cord of shared suffering, they opened up to him, exposed themselves and revealed their doubts and there, in the cruelty of their discussion, something was built, something new . , something honest, something lasting. Strange things happen to humans when one of their fellow human beings opens a door. It's as if all the fear of a nation was leaking out. In 1998, legendary South Korean golfer Se Ri Pak, whose father left her. at night in a cemetery to learn how to deal with fear, won the first major women's golf tournament by a South Korean. Since then, 13 different South Korean women have won 23 women's majors two decades earlier, this Viking with an aversion to razors. Wimbledon named Bjorn Borg brought Swedish impassivity to tennis. He won 11 Grand Slam titles from 1974 to 1981 and spawned myths (heart rate 35?), legends and a brood of respectful heirs named Mats.