An Olympics of the marginalised woman

As Dipa Karmakar bows out of the Rio Olympics 2016 in a stunning display of guts, confidence and energy, we are disappointed at losing out on yet another medal prospect. Such disappointment follows the usual trajectory of much introspection, administrative criticism and cultural critique as a sporting nation.

What we do not see, however, is the large contingent of women athletes and sportspersons who are emerging from the shadows to reclaim the Olympics. This is important considering Indian women have only recently reclaimed the very public space of sports as their own.

It is also important because Dipa Karmakar deliberately chose the risky and death-defying Produnova or the ‘vault of death’ as her gymnastics manoeuvre to reach for the gold; or that Lalita Shivaji Babar performed her personal best in the very difficult and strenuous 3,000 meters steeplechase to enter the finals of the Olympic track event.

While we lambast Shobha De for her sarcasm and hide our shame at the sports minister’s shenanigans, a small group of women lead the Indian brigade from the front. Women sportspersons, like athlete Dutee Chand, travelled 36 hours by economy class while sports officials and bureaucrats travelled business class.

But this is not peculiar to India, as world over women seek to regain the limited spaces they are given in worldwide sporting arenas. The Rio Olympics has also been glaring for the kind of misogynistic news reporting that has followed women medal winners.

On NBC, for Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu’s record-breaking performance in the 400 meters individual relay, her coach was credited with her win. At the same time, in the Chicago Tribune, trap shooting gold medallist Corey Cogdell-Unrein was identified as the wife of a baseball player, marking once again that women are not sportspersons in their own right, ever.

The Egyptian women’s beach volleyball team fights it out in burqas and hijabs that are contrary to the visual appeal of the sport (toned women in bikinis), presenting for the first time to the world the importance of viewing a sport for its thrill and madness and not for the visuality of female bodies.

But let’s move away from the myopia that marks the representation and understanding of women’s sports competitions to the ways in which most of our women athletes from underprivileged backgrounds fight it out at international sports events. For, it is archer Deepika Kumari or Dipa Karmakar or Dutee Chand or Lalita Babar (hailing from the drought-hit Satara in Maharashtra) who mark India’s entry into the Olympics.

Driven by desperation
These are women who are hungry and desperate. Their desperation drives them to overcome many hardships to be able to compete in international events where other athletes are at a definite advantage, thanks to state support.

Deepika and Dipa have nothing to go back to but poverty. No medal means they will be relegated to a life of penury and struggles where they may be disrespected and abused. In such a situation, to truly be able to compete and fulfil the national hunger for medals is remarkable; it’s a feat by itself.

This is not to seek an apologist position, but to believe that we have medal winners who exist despite all odds. And these winners are women from a society that is not kind to them. Just hours after Dipa qualified for the finals, in a fake news item, she had been awarded the gold medal. Imagine the pressure and the expectations that Indian male cricketers lament about after losing every match of significance, being transposed to a woman who has never played at a big world event against veteran Olympic medallists. 

This is the Olympics of the marginalised woman. Of Simone Manuel who won a gold in swimming for the Unites States where Black women were once barred from using public swimming pools; or Yusra Mardini, the Syrian refugee who escaped the war and madness in her country in a dinghy filled with 20 people, to battle it out in the Olympics swimming event, or the Afghan runner who ran in her hijab but was unable to qualify – to these women we owe more than a standing ovation.

These are stories of survival, of battling with systemic violence and apathy. These women compete because competing itself matters. Sometimes, it is the means, the competition and the death-defying vault that matter more than the gold.

(The writer is Assistant Professor, Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University)