BOMBAY, 21 August 2004 — The ongoing Athens Olympic Games, which opened last week in deep-rooted nostalgia in that the greatest sporting cavalcade on earth had returned to its original home, after going around the world, like a circus, for more than a hundred years. It was at Olympus, not far from Athens, that the Olympic Games were born some 2500 years ago.
The way the facilities and all round arrangements have turned out to be must have made the doubting Thomases bite the dust. A small nation has risen to the enormous challenge in a big way to host what is indeed the biggest Games ever, what with 12,500 participants from 202 countries taking part in 28 different discipline. Without the slightest fanfare, everything has been so well laid out and the competitors, as well as the officials, media persons and the spectators are having a whale of a time. The most modern electronic gadgetry has been brought into use to cover every aspect of judging the competition.
If security is the biggest worry these days for a host nation, as far as sporting contests are concerned, the subtle use of performance-enhancing drugs is no less a challenge faced by the organizers. Having realized this, it is for the first time in the Olympic Games that a system of advance dope tests for all the participants has been introduced. So, no one could have come to Athens with a record of use of banned substances. If such measures are administered during the Games, then a most modern laboratory is in place that works round the clock.
There is no doubt that the International Olympic Committee has come down heavily on those suspected of drug abuse. At least half a dozen leading US athletes, some of them Olympic gold medalists, have been banned from participation. This is bound to serve as a deterrent to all other athletes. If the Americans are the worst violators of drug control, the reasons are not far to seek. The incentives for winning an Olympic gold medal are too high and tempting. It is estimated that a single gold-medal winner becomes richer by at least a million dollars by way of gifts and endorsement contracts. Secondly, the sophisticated manner in which the performing-enhancing drugs are manufactured these days, makes detection extremely difficult. There are antidotes, that are invented side by side, that help to wipe out all traces of such drugs from the system. Not for nothing is the IOC spending millions of dollars on the detection of the use of banned substances. It wants to be a step ahead of the drug abusers. It is the use of high technology for the good of sports and the money spent is considered all very worthwhile.
Talking of technology, the International Cricket Council is now decided to extend the use of electronic gadgetry in the supervision of the game. Now the field umpires will be connected to the stump microphone which magnifies the sound at the batting end. These sounds will reach the umpires through their ear plugs. This will help the umpires to adjudge, in particular, incidents of close-catching and whether these have come genuinely from the edges of the bat or off the pads of the batsmen at the crease.
As it is, all line decisions (stumping, run-outs and the act of the ball crossing the boundary lines), are decided by the television umpire sitting in the pavilion, though several replays of the action. The help of the third umpire is also sought for some doubtful decisions on which they cannot adjudicate clearly.
There was also a suggestion that the responsibility of judging leg before wicket decisions should also be shoved on the third umpire. This has been shelved temporarily, as they might go completely against the perception of the field umpires. It is also realized that the drawing of imaginary lines from stumps to stumps to establish the line of the deliveries is not fool-proof because, this arrangement (or hawk-eye as it is called) does not provide for measuring the intensity of the bounce of the ball from the pitch. That will still be left to the discretion of the field umpires.
The other suggestion is with regard to the call of the no-ball when the bowlers breaches the line that defines the return-crease. It was argued that the new front-foot rule for no-balls had put a great strain on the field umpire, as he had to watch the front foot of the bowler until the very last delivery stride, leaving him only a split-second to shift his sight to the batting end and watch the projection of the ball and its contact with the bat. The television cameras have often showed that a bowler had crossed the line and had delivered a no-ball in cases where he had even captured a wicket. The fielding side had got away and the batsman had suffered because the umpire had failed to notice the infringement. It is only a matter of time when this arrangement will be brought into force to take a big load off the shoulders of the field umpires.
There are two ways of looking at all these changes. The die-hards believe that more and more reliance on technology will turn the umpires on the field into mere robots and deprive the game of the human touch. There are others who feel that when so much is at stake and that a simple lapse by an umpire could drastically change the course of a game, all decisions should be as close to perfection as possible.
The prime question that arises is: Can technology itself be perfect? There have been occasions when one angle of the replay has differed from the same shot captured by a camera placed at another position, mostly in cases of deciding on a run-out appeal. The patent statement of the commentators in such cases have been: “The benefit of the doubt must go to the batsman.” The benefit of doubt... So, there is admission of an element of doubt even what is considered a faithful technological reproduction of the action on the field. Will that bring us back to square one?
