Congratulations from all Jalandharies !

by jalandhari 8/20/2008 7:39:00 PM posted on www.jalandhari.com/jblog

Many Many Congratulations to Boxer Vijender Kumar and wrestler Sushil Kumar on confirming and winning their medals from all Jalandharies !

For people who do not know India has never won more than 2 medals in any of Olympics. India's previous best Olympic medal aggregate has been a gold and a bronze that it had won in Helsinki in 1952.Beside India winning a gold in Hockey, wrestler K.D. Jadhav won the bronze in 1952 Olympics

Since the Helsinki Games, India has been ending its Olympic campaign with either a single or no medals. After a bronze medal in 1952, Leander Paes won a bronze in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Then weightlifter K. Malleshwari (bronze, Sydney 2000), shooter Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (silver, shooting, Athens 2004) and Abhinav Bindra (shooting, gold, Beijing 2008) have been the other individual medal winners.



On that note, one of our reader "Mr. Ajay Sharma" emailed us this interesting article on state of Indian sports and politics.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni wins the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna becoming the second cricketer after Sachin Tendulkar to win the highest civilian award for sportsmen.

Now I can anticipate the reaction from the perennially grumpy traditionalists. They are first going to pull down the whole concept of government-granted awards by pointing out that sarkari samman is determined more by politics, pull and regional considerations rather than by merit, conveniently forgetting contrary examples to their thesis—like Saif Ali Khan winning a National Award for the path-breaking “Hum Tum”.

Then they will go after Dhoni’s most-average Test record and wonder how that translates to a cricketing achievement award. They will pooh-pooh Dhoni’s one day series win in Australia and T20 victory as credentials that do not merit such a high honor, especially in the light of the fact that Kapil Dev, who won the One day World Cup and did some other things of note (like 400 odd Test wickets), was passed over.

They will ask how in purely cricketing terms as of 2008, has Dhoni achieved more than Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Anil Kumble, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid?