Aditya Sinha: Meta-humans ascend Mt Olympus

On Friday night I sat glued to my TV watching the Rio Olympicsrsquo 20km walk At first the athletes looked like they were running which isnrsquot allowed but their heels in fact touched the ground Their hips swayed so vigorously that I told my wife they were dancing She scolded me for my ldquoendless nonstoprdquo stopping only when I pointed out that the Chinese walkers wore red shorts which were tight in the front The lead kept changing until the final few kilometres several early leaders mdash an Englishman a Kenyan a Japanese mdash faltered and did not recover The athletesrsquo faces were each a snapshot of the gruelling race they walked Three Indians took part but two were disqualified Manish Singh finished at 13th and though that did not win him a medal it was still a job well done The Chinese won gold and silver so perhaps there was something magical in their shortsSports Minister Vijay Goel poses with boxer Manoj Kumar The minister has come under much criticism for his over enthusiasm to be photographed with Indian athletes at the Rio Games PicPTIThe walk was more fun than the swimming mdash except for the 400m relay American Michael Phelps anchored and won On the turn he was underwater for an uncanny stretch of time surfacing with the lead of what had till then been a neckandneck race And to think that he champions marijuana which usually simulates a slowdown of time These were his last games and we are lucky to have watched him liveTime was similarly Einsteinian in the 100m race heats Each heat was expectedly absorbing until Usain Bolt the worldrsquos fastest human since the 2008 Beijing Olympics took position At the shot the runners propelled forward like bandits leaving the 30yearold Bolt momentarily lagging ldquoThe old man is hobbling alongrdquo I told my wife but before I finished Bolt began to effortlessly float to the front and before you could say ldquorelicrdquo he was the first person across the finish It was a ten second race but those final seconds seemed to unpack into an eon as if the gravity of his superhumanity had warped the spacetime continuum If you didnrsquot see it live you will never know If yoursquore reading this before 655 am go watch the finalOn my 100minute evening walk I wondered if it was possible for me to train for the 20km race Probably But what separates us from these Olympians mdash besides age mdash is that no amount of training would take me across the timebarrier Perhaps I could walk it in two hours but the Olympicswinning one hour 19 minutes was beyond my stratosphere Similarly with the 100m race mdash maybe the best people Irsquove met in my life could do it in 17 seconds or even 15 but I doubt if any mortal could penetrate the timezone within which the Olympians reignOther moments my heart was in my mouth was when archers Deepika Kumari Bombayla Laishram and Atanu Das steadied their bows A mathematician on Twitter worked out the margin of error for them Itrsquos less than a third of a millimetre Yes Plus the wind is a rival worse than any competitor Despite having not won any medals our archers belong on Mount OlympusI probably donrsquot watch as much Olympics as some others but this is still the first time in decades that Irsquove watched so much of the Games so devotedly The last time I did so was when Nadia Comaneci wowed the world and stole my 12yearold heart at the 1976 Montreal Olympics As I said earlier you had to have seen her live to really experience the magic of her gymnasticsWhen US president Jimmy Carter led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the previous December I lost interest in watching the Games and after 1980 I got busy with high school college and then a career It didnrsquot help that Soviets in retaliation boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Games By the next Olympics I was back in India busy with journalism My interest revived during the 2008 Beijing Games when Michael Phelps and his extraterrestrial anatomy and his endless calorie intake featured on our Sport pages Now that Irsquove stopped being a newspaperbureaucrat the Games have my attention againItrsquos frustrating that Indian medal hopes have nearly vanished especially since a new era had dawned during the Manmohan Singh years when Abhinav Bindra won our first gold mdash his loss in the tiebreaker for the bronze medal in Rio was heartbreaking mdash and India won multiple medals In the Narendra Modi years we hear only lip service to our athletes while we watch Nita Ambani and Vijay Goel inexplicably dominate our contingent For them itrsquos probably only about whether you win or lose and not about how you play the gameSenior journalist Aditya Sinha is a contributor to the recently published anthology House Spirit Drinking in India He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom