Billiards? Chess? Organizers of the next Asian Games, an Olympic-style event staged every four years for the top athletes of the world's most populous continent, say the time has come to trim the ever-swelling games down to a more reasonable — and affordable — size.
But cuts are never easy, and the mere suggestion that, say, India's beloved sport of cricket might get the ax has almost been enough to scandalize a whole subcontinent.
That the games, which have grown bigger than the Winter Olympics, are getting out of hand is a point of general agreement.
This year's event, which wraps up Saturday, was the biggest ever.
The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou for the past two weeks has been swamped by more than 10, 000 athletes from 45 countries and regions. That was hundreds more than the previous games, held in Doha, Qatar, four years ago.
Another 4,750 team officials have also descended on the city. China alone — in its successful quest to set a new gold-winning record — sent a delegation of 1,500 people.
But bigger isn't always better.
Concerned by the games' growth, the Olympic Council of Asia has decided to reduce the number of sports at future Asian Games to 35 — 28 from the Olympic program and seven more that reflect the region's culture. The Guangzhou Games had 42 sports.
“The OCA felt that the Asian Games had grown too big,” Randhir Singh, general-secretary of the OCA, said when the decision was announced late last year.
The idea was to get the Asian Games more in line with the schedule for the Rio De Jeneiro Olympics, and to trim away some of the accumulated fat of sports with a limited appeal and no Olympic credentials that has made the games a costly, logistical headache for their hosts.
So the organizers of the next games, to be held in Incheon, South Korea, proposed cutting sports such as cricket and dance — which features among other things the cha cha cha — from the 2014 program.
The cut-list suggested by Incheon wasn't terribly surprising.
According to the OCA, the games' next host put on the chopping block cricket, cue sports, dance sport, dragon boat racing, roller sports and — though Bobby Fischer may be rolling in his grave — chess. Tenpin bowling is looking at a possible switchover from the Asian Games to the Asian Indoor Games.
But if you happen to be a fan of cricket — like millions of south Asians — the whole idea was an outrage.
Why cricket, instead of, for instance, squash? Or why single out bowling, loved by millions around the world, and not the enigmatic game of kabaddi, which is virtually unknown outside of India and its immediate neighbors? The Indian uproar about cricket was too big to be ignored.
Cricket successfully rallied its forces to hold its slot, as did Japan's martial art of karate, with OCA honorary life Vice President Wei Jizhong saying he backed cricket's inclusion at Incheon because the sport is “very popular and influential in Asia.” But not all sports have strong lobbies going for them.
Kabaddi is a perennial endangered species at the games.
The tag-like game involves a player “raiding” his opponent's court and touching as many of the defenders as possible without getting caught. The player must chant “kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi” on a single breath while raiding. It dates back centuries and was used to train warriors mentally when they weren't at battle.
The sport was introduced to the games in 1990, and India's men have never lost — which is taken by many as proof that it's a one-country event. This year, only seven countries competed in men's kabaddi. Even host China, which was inescapable at virtually every other venue, didn't field a team.
India's men and women won golds yet again on Friday.
Still, supporters say sports like kabaddi — or the acrobatic sport of sepaktakraw which is big in southeast Asia, or China's graceful martial art of wushu — are what give the Asian Games their special flavor.
“All that is required for kabaddi is a t-shirt and a pair of shoes,” said India's women's coach, Sunil Dabas. “It's all about excitement and entertainment. Kabaddi is such an enjoyable game, I'm sure it won't be excluded from the Asian Games.”
