Sports enthusiasts seem to have worked up an euphoria over the stirring sprinting performances of a couple of Kambala buffalo jockeys. Speed is a verifiable commodity; it is still relative more than absolute. A Kambala jockey dragged along by two speeding buffaloes on a slushy surface is somewhat different from a tuned-to-the-minute athlete running 100 metres from the starting blocks and achieving a momentum on his own while competing with his peers on an artificial surface with spiked shoes on.
Nothing detracts from the merits of young men willing to figure in Kambala races with its associated thrills and spills. It is, however, an activity they have trained themselves to do in a rural milieu far from the scientific sophistication of man’s yearning for speed in starred athletic events like sprints that have evolved in well over 100 years, from 10.8 seconds in 1891 to 9.58 seconds in 2009.
The ingenuous sports minister may imagine sprinting talent has been spotted, but it has been done so on the basis of quirky, handheld stopwatch timing, lending the runs a magical feel. This is the sporting equivalent of old theorists who used to that all you had to do to find fast bowlers was to whistle down a coal mine shaft in Yorkshire or shout from the rooftops in Punjab for strapping young men to come and train to consistently bowl the cricket ball upwards of 150 kmph.
The spirit with which the Kambala jockeys are being feted in headline-grabbing moves while being given the opportunity to prove themselves on the track is to be appreciated. But don’t confuse their feats with those of Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man over 100 metres. Nor imagine that records in 100 metres, in which all eight finalists in most recent Olympics have been of Afro-Caribbean descent suggesting a particular progression of racial strengths, can be broken by rural youth from Karnataka, notwithstanding their sculpted bodies.
