This city-based retired officer of Canara Bank and also an international announcer is one of the renowned voices in sporting arenas. In his heydays, Sukumar has also won two gold medals at the state-level Dasara sports meet in the diving competition during the year 1971 and 1978.
He has also been the announcer at the Veteran Asian Athletic Championship held in Bangalore in the year 2000.
Standards dropping
Despite all these titles, Sukumar feels sad that his services aren’t being fully utilised. With hundreds of athletes descending on the city to participate in the Dasara competitions, Sukumar opines that the standards of announcing are dropping to new levels.
However, what angers him is that services of stalwarts in the field of announcing such as Balasubramanyam, Mahadevappa and others are not being used by the organisers of the sports meet.
“When the city has a large number of announcers, why do you have to call people from Bangalore?” he questions.
Recalling the way announcers captivate the audience, Sukumar showed his oratorial skills. He said, “Let’s imagine that a high jump event is underway. First you would have to call the athletes and then compare records at the international level and give an interesting titbit.”
Citing an example, he announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, all high jumpers qualified from respective divisions, should report near the high jump pit. For those who didnt’ know, the current men's record holder is Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, who jumped a height of 2.45 metres in 1993. This gentlemen is nearly equal to the height of a football post.”
Expressing his love for the game, Sukumar said that he has named his son after Taguchi Nobutaka, the gold medalist at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
When Deccan Herald spoke to department of youth services and sports (DYSS) assistant director K Suresh, he said that the Dasara sports sub-committee had thought of a different concept for the event. He said that stress was on announcements to be made in various regional dialects of the state during this Dasara.
