AIBA should be lenient to Sarita

Boxer Sarita Devi’s emotional outburst on the podium became the talking point of India’s participation at the Asian Games in Incheon, upstaging even the superb gold medal winning performances of M.C. Mary Kom, the men’s hockey team and the 4x400m women’s relay quartet among others. Sarita’s cause was taken up with gusto by the media and support for her back home swelled into crores of peoples. This did not change the colour of her medal from bronze (Sarita also subsequently apologised to the Olympic Council of Asia and the world boxing federation, Aiba), but the feeling is that she had scored a point for justice.

She did in many ways. Call me old school, but I wish she had gone about it differently without losing. There is no denying Sarita the right — and indeed even the need — to protest, yet there is a subtle difference between protest and pique.

If one analyses the entire event dispassionately, Sarita’s grievance was against the refereeing/scoring system and the apathy of her own officials in not being around to support her in a crisis. By putting the medal around the neck of the Korean girl, she only demeaned a fellow athlete.

Sarita would know that the ball does not roll kindly all the time. There can be mistakes made, even fudging sadly happens, but the redress to this is not in belittling another boxer.

Some people have thrown up the example of the Black Glove protest by Tommy Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics, but this is a mismatch. The American athletes were protesting against racism in their own country.

The more pertinent example in this situation I think is of Pakistan hockey players putting their silver medal on their shoes in protest against poor umpiring after losing the Olympic final in Munich 1972 and that cut a sorry spectacle.Meanwhile, strong action must be taken against errant IOA officials who left her in the lurch when Sarita needed them most.