Why do the thinking, or the more successful sportsmen, generally stay away from the very discipline they've spent a better part of their youth in ? This is not an isolated phenomenon, but something that afflicts almost all in Indian sport. Sunil Gavaskar or Kapil Dev prefer a career away from cricket administration; there are hardly any top-class hockey players involved in the running of their sport; and the likes of Ramanathan Krishnan or Vijay Amritraj keep their distance from tennis officialdom. It can hardly be a coincidence.

Charles Borromeo, Asian Games gold medallist at New Delhi in 1982, has a ready answer, ``No one respects athletes, even if they are gold medallists. I wouldn't want to work with people who have no respect for what I have done.``Look around, at this moment in this stadium, there are athletes who have won medals for India and most of them were not just runners or throwers, but good students of the sport. Some of them may not have NIS diplomas, but no athletics follower, in his right senses, can doubt their ability to give something back to athletics,'' says he.

In this context, he recalls an incident as recent as last year, when an Asian medallist and a National record holder, was ordered in full public view to get tea for an official, whose list of athletics achievements would not compare favourably with even that of a school athlete.

So many of the former athletes who have not been accepted by the system -- read the Amateur Athletic Federation of India -- have gone outside or stayed on the periphery and provided Indian athletics something to stand on.

Borromeo is an intelligent man, and holds no rancour towards anyone. He is still sought after, either as one who can impart tips on fitness or one who can provide effective commentary. Besides, he is an important person in the sports set-up within the Tatas, where it takes more than just glib talk to be good. What he says makes sense and many others echo the same sentiment.

Here, even as the athletics events are on, he takes time to mix around some of his old friends, Bagicha Singh, Ashwini Nachappa, Reeth Abraham, Subhash Mathew and others. Each one of them a star in their own right, but non-entities as far as the present set-up in the AAFI is concerned.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.