Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sports. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sports. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

MS Dhoni, Arun Pandey Links Go Beyond Rhiti Sports

By M H Ahssan / Mumbai

Rhiti Sports Management and its main promoter, Arun Pandey, might deny that Indian cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni holds any share in the company, but what they cannot deny is that Pandey and Dhoni have been and continue to be business partners, spelling a high probability of conflict of interest for the Indian captain.

Sources accessed documents filed by at least two other firms with the ministry of corporate affairs which show that Dhoni and his family held shares in firms where the only other partners were Pandey and Rhiti Sports.

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Star TV Network Focusses On 'Indian Expansion Spree'

Star is looking to cement its leadership in the Indian market with a Rs 20,000-cr investment in sports content. Will it shine brighter? 

James Murdoch did not know that kabaddi is an Indian sport. It was even tougher explaining how it is played. Yet he said: let’s go for it.” This is how Uday Shankar, chief executive officer of Star India, de scribes the reaction of his boss and chief operating officer of 21st Century Fox to the proposal to beam kabaddi on the Star network in mid-2014.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Focus: Why Does Sports Medicine Ail In India?

The passing away of Australian batsman Philip Hughes in an unfortunate on-field incident has triggered a lot of soul-searching among sports medicine doctors in Hyderabad and elsewhere in India. 

Most agree that the lack of a robust ecosystem for sports medicine in India has become a major roadblock to producing sportspersons who can sustain their game at the highest level for long. 

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Special Report: Indian Sports’ Leap Into The Abyss

By Vishal Shekhar / INN Bureau

After the ban comes the cover-up. Indian sports administrators are yet to learn from the Olympic ban. Over 100 Indian athletes aged 14-17 who will participate in the second Asian Youth Games in China this August are unlikely to compete under the Indian flag. Seven months after the biggest sports governing body of the world banned its Indian affiliate from the Olympics the likelihood of India being represented at international sporting events in the near future looks bleak.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Special Report: Global Brands Drive More Than 6,000 Crore In India’s Active Sportswear Market

If there is one market segment that is clearly marked by the dominion of global brands in India – it’s active sportswear. 

From a segment driven by a collection of largely unorganized and homegrown SMEs two decades ago, today these international icons have not just made the market much more organised but have bolstered its overall size to over Rs. 6,000 crores. Many pure-play brands today are also into sports accessories, gear & equipment, while others have expanded their offerings to include sports-inspired product lines.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

How Private Enterprise Is Changing Non-Cricket Sports?

India Inc has entered the country's sporting arena, and is changing the way the nation plays.

There was a time, not too long ago, when it was taken for granted that an aspiring sportsperson in India would have to do any or all of the following: 
  • Secure a job in a public sector company, or a large private sector one, for a regular income.
  • Scramble for corporate sponsorship to be able to compete at international or even national tournaments.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

CrickNext: 'BCCI Can Use 'India' Only If It Comes Under RTI'

By Aleem Faizi / Mumbai

Draft Sports Bill states cricket board will have right to represent 'India' only if it comes under RTI. The BCCI could be again set on collision course with the Sports Ministry as a contentious clause in the Draft National Sports Development Bill states that only those federations who come under the Right to Information Act (RTI) ambit will have the right to use 'India' as the team's name. 

The committee headed by Justice (retired) Mukul Mudgal today submitted the Draft National Sports Developmemt Bill to the ministry which was later put up on its website.

Clause (h) of the proposed Bill will certainly cause a few problems for the BCCI as it pertains to use of country name in sporting activities.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Creating 1,000 Milkha Singhs for Indian sport

By M H Ahssan

Even before a line of script has been written and the first shot canned, Milkha Singh’s act of selling his life’s story to filmmakers for just Re1 has already been extremely inspiring.

An orphan of the Partition who struggled against trauma and adversity, the very mention of his name creates a wave of excitement. Therefore, when the Flying Sikh (so nicknamed because of his splendid athletic record at the Tokyo Asiad (1956), Cardiff Commonwealth Games (1958) and the Rome Olympics, 1960) decided to help capture his life on film there was jubilation all around.

His passion and a burning desire to see his country prosper in sports are evident and he has been pained by India’s dismal performance in international sports, especially athletics.

The film will, no doubt, be a source of inspiration to many, but whether it will translate into medals is a moot question because inspiration alone is not enough. The ground reality is such that India is unlikely to get medals till professionals take charge and politicians are restricted to ceremonial duties in sports.

Last year, Indian Olympic Association chairman Suresh Kalmadi supervised the spending of nearly Rs200 crore on creating a magnificent, international class sports complex in Pune for the Commonwealth Youth Games (CYG). Post-CYG, the infrastructure has not been of much use to most sports associations in the city who are unable to hold training camps or tournaments there because of high rentals. This same complaint is heard from national associations also. Thus, very often, the CYG complex is hired for entertainment shows or college youth festivals.

Although Pune has been famous as the cradle of Indian hockey, having produced such legends such as Babu Nimal, Joe Philips and Dhanraj Pillay, the city lacks a decent hockey ground for its children. Till recently, a newly constructed hockey stadium was left neglected to the extent that the ground could not be played on and the fittings and fixtures were stolen and vandalised. The irony is that this did not bother any of Pune’s politicians — including Kalmadi — even after it was brought to their notice.

The lack of grounds with synthetic surfaces such as astroturf for junior teams at the inter-school level — inspite of heavy government subsidies — is part of the reason for India’s poor performance in international hockey. A small country like Holland has 400 such grounds across schools. Indian professionals say that the game is lost by the time our best players reach the national team because of inadequate practice on synthetic surfaces in the formative years. India needs such grounds in every promising city and European coaches to elevate standards in hockey.

As has happened in cricket, the day-to-day running of various associations has to be left to professionals and a steady stream of talented players has to be identified and trained to consolidate team strength. Too much dependence on just a handful of star players is not good for Indian sports. Professionals also lament the complete lack of a long-term national vision and a road-map to achieve specific goals in sports. There’s plenty of money today, but no direction. Politicians are efficient when it comes to spending crores of rupees in constructing stadia and sports complexes; but disastrous in sports administration and management.

Indian sport needs Milkha Singhs by the hundred to inspire and guide budding talent,along with visionarieslike Sam Pitroda to chart a roadmap for revolutionary change. We have done it in telecom; we can do it in sports.

Till that happens and till politicians are kept at bay in sports, we can only dream of winning medals. An inspiring film will make us feel good. Winning medals is an altogether different ballgame.

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Editorial: No work and no play ...

By M H Ahssan

All work and no play has made Indians among the dullest people on Earth with whom to have a conversation, while no work and all play has pushed Americans to the most terrifying economic crisis of our time. What then do we do about countries that neither work nor play, as Pakistan seems in the danger of becoming, if one were to go by the most recent terrorist outrage?

Granted that both parts of the first statement are more than a trifle exaggerated, it is likely that readers will sympathize with the view on a broader scale. Any conversation with an Indian inevitably leads to politics, religion - or worse, Bollywood. If Indians manage at all to make any observations about sports, expect to talk about cricket, that ancient English game invented for people to play on lazy summer afternoons after a large beer-laden lunch. Generally one dreads these conversations if one has nothing to say about the most recent Intel chip, and especially if you have not a clue what a quad-core chip is.

Having conversations with Americans is generally a pleasure if for nothing else because serious topics such as religion and geopolitics are almost never broached; but most folks from Asia are usually left wondering how Americans manage to follow such a dizzying array of sports. Usually the next observation is along the lines of why do people with such strong sporting passions fail so miserably in their jobs?

All these though pale in comparison to the dangers of the third bunch of people who are progressively denied, as a religious tool, access to entertainment, eventually culminating in stunted social development that creates its own cycle of poverty. Afghanistan is the foremost example of this in the Islamic world.

After the Taliban takeover of the country in the early 1990s, sporting activities were progressively banned (perhaps that should be "regressively") or else merged with the ruling party's socio-economic ethic, which led to the chilling images filmed secretly by a British television channel that showed a veiled woman being stoned to death in the middle of a football pitch watched by some 30,000 spectators.

Americans have half-time entertainment too during their football games, although it takes more than a simple leap of imagination from having a couple of nubile, half-naked singers performing the latest pop hits to a crowd stoning a woman to death. To ensure full attention, the Taliban also suspended the actual football games on the pitch; perhaps they were worried about safety of players encountering difficulties playing football on a pitch littered with stones and pools of blood.

Given that the perpetrators of the most recent outrage in Pakistan this week involving the attacks on a visiting Sri Lankan cricket team had similar motivations, the question does arise if the first shots have been fired in the ultimate Talibanization of the country; a scenario that I have explained more than once on these pages.

Sporting prestige
Harking back to George Clemenceau's quote that war is too important to be left to generals, sport has become a new focus in a world where full-scale bilateral conflicts have been replaced with guerrilla warfare and random attacks on civilians.

Beginning in 776 BC, the Greeks certainly knew the importance of sports as the various city-states vied for honors in the Olympic games. The reputation of many a nation was forged not so much in the theatres of war as the sandpits of Olympia. The Roman emperor Nero took the games seriously enough to bribe officials for the express purpose of disqualifying all other competitors in his category.

The echoes of Nero were to ring 2,000 years later, when Hitler staged Aryan superiority Olympics in Berlin, only to be upstaged by the black American athlete Jesse Owens' triumphs on the field, as his pet-architect Albert Speer was to recall: "Each of the German victories, and there were a surprising number of these, made him happy, but he was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games. Hitler was also jolted by the jubilation of the Berliners when the French team filed solemnly into the Olympic Stadium ... If I am correctly interpreting Hitler's expression at the time, he was more disturbed than pleased by the Berliners' cheers."
Following from Adolf Hitler, various communist countries quickly adopted sports as a matter of national prestige starting with the Soviet Union [5], a focus not lost on its acolytes in the rest of the Warsaw Pact as well as others including China and Cuba.

All this while other countries, including the United States and those in Western Europe, broadened the commercial appeal of sports; the 1951 live telecast of a college football game in the US opened the doors for sportsmen to become idolized and increasingly successful in the financial sense. In turn, this attracted more participants to sports; a self-feeding frenzy that soon produced better sports as events became much more competitive.

Between communist pride and Western commercial interests, the frenzy in sports also led sportsmen to cheat, resorting to steroids and banned drugs with a view to performance enhancement. In communist countries, the penalty for getting caught was nothing more than a slap on the wrist, the ongoing damage to bodies was another matter altogether being the subject of basic denial. Meanwhile in the West, commercially induced cheating produced a mini-boom in demand for chemistry graduates albeit in areas far removed from their usual spots in foul-smelling school labs.

The reason any of this became relevant in the rest of the world is of course the effect that cheating had on the aspirations of the young as well as the social commentary that inevitably followed. Sportsmen who cheated lost their fan following (at least in the past they did) but also elicited broader comparisons going back to their social or ethnic groups; in some cases it became the subject of national scandals.

Virtuous non-participation
With all this cheating going on, many countries and societies have fallen by the wayside of modern sports. I wrote in the previously cited article [5] about the poor record of Indian sportsmen, concluding that the lack of economic incentives explained their lack of participation not to mention excellence. About the only sport that Indians seem to be any good in is cricket, and herein lies the rub for the most recent terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Indian cricketers are paid substantially more than those in any other nation playing the sport; more importantly they are also reportedly in the top echelons of the country's own population when it comes to oversized pay. This puts them in the same category as American baseball and football stars, not to mention the ubiquitous basketball legends of the Michael Jordan variety.

All that wealth in an Asian sport clearly attracts attention, of the type that Islamic terrorists revel in. Far from an ideological conflict involving sports per se (although enough Wahhabi scholarship holds that sports activities are frowned upon) the issue is more subtle, involving the attention span of a people used to diversions.

In any poor country, the general time allocated to sports, leisure or entertainment activities is relatively small, which means that avid spectators are unlikely to also care about more serious topics such as religion and politics. That fear of marginalization, more than any specific political agenda, justifies the attention of Islamic terrorists who would like nothing more than keeping their support pipelines thick and strong with embedded national outrage.

In contrast, a people inured to the ups and downs of sports are unlikely to support extremism in its many forms. Good sportspeople respect their competitors, as do good spectators however fervent their support for the home team may be. People without much interest in sports - playing or watching - are more likely to indulge in violence: although ironically that observation reverses when we discuss peoples rather than the propensity of specific individuals to violence [6].

This then is the actual battleground. As Pakistanis suffer further damage on their economy due to the economic crisis, their sporting aspirations are also being dented, in turn pushing more young people into the path of the fundamentalists to recruit, train and utilize as cannon fodder.

Editorial: No work and no play ...

By M H Ahssan

All work and no play has made Indians among the dullest people on Earth with whom to have a conversation, while no work and all play has pushed Americans to the most terrifying economic crisis of our time. What then do we do about countries that neither work nor play, as Pakistan seems in the danger of becoming, if one were to go by the most recent terrorist outrage?

Granted that both parts of the first statement are more than a trifle exaggerated, it is likely that readers will sympathize with the view on a broader scale. Any conversation with an Indian inevitably leads to politics, religion - or worse, Bollywood. If Indians manage at all to make any observations about sports, expect to talk about cricket, that ancient English game invented for people to play on lazy summer afternoons after a large beer-laden lunch. Generally one dreads these conversations if one has nothing to say about the most recent Intel chip, and especially if you have not a clue what a quad-core chip is.

Having conversations with Americans is generally a pleasure if for nothing else because serious topics such as religion and geopolitics are almost never broached; but most folks from Asia are usually left wondering how Americans manage to follow such a dizzying array of sports. Usually the next observation is along the lines of why do people with such strong sporting passions fail so miserably in their jobs?

All these though pale in comparison to the dangers of the third bunch of people who are progressively denied, as a religious tool, access to entertainment, eventually culminating in stunted social development that creates its own cycle of poverty. Afghanistan is the foremost example of this in the Islamic world.

After the Taliban takeover of the country in the early 1990s, sporting activities were progressively banned (perhaps that should be "regressively") or else merged with the ruling party's socio-economic ethic, which led to the chilling images filmed secretly by a British television channel that showed a veiled woman being stoned to death in the middle of a football pitch watched by some 30,000 spectators.

Americans have half-time entertainment too during their football games, although it takes more than a simple leap of imagination from having a couple of nubile, half-naked singers performing the latest pop hits to a crowd stoning a woman to death. To ensure full attention, the Taliban also suspended the actual football games on the pitch; perhaps they were worried about safety of players encountering difficulties playing football on a pitch littered with stones and pools of blood.

Given that the perpetrators of the most recent outrage in Pakistan this week involving the attacks on a visiting Sri Lankan cricket team had similar motivations, the question does arise if the first shots have been fired in the ultimate Talibanization of the country; a scenario that I have explained more than once on these pages.

Sporting prestige
Harking back to George Clemenceau's quote that war is too important to be left to generals, sport has become a new focus in a world where full-scale bilateral conflicts have been replaced with guerrilla warfare and random attacks on civilians.

Beginning in 776 BC, the Greeks certainly knew the importance of sports as the various city-states vied for honors in the Olympic games. The reputation of many a nation was forged not so much in the theatres of war as the sandpits of Olympia. The Roman emperor Nero took the games seriously enough to bribe officials for the express purpose of disqualifying all other competitors in his category.

The echoes of Nero were to ring 2,000 years later, when Hitler staged Aryan superiority Olympics in Berlin, only to be upstaged by the black American athlete Jesse Owens' triumphs on the field, as his pet-architect Albert Speer was to recall: "Each of the German victories, and there were a surprising number of these, made him happy, but he was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games. Hitler was also jolted by the jubilation of the Berliners when the French team filed solemnly into the Olympic Stadium ... If I am correctly interpreting Hitler's expression at the time, he was more disturbed than pleased by the Berliners' cheers."
Following from Adolf Hitler, various communist countries quickly adopted sports as a matter of national prestige starting with the Soviet Union [5], a focus not lost on its acolytes in the rest of the Warsaw Pact as well as others including China and Cuba.

All this while other countries, including the United States and those in Western Europe, broadened the commercial appeal of sports; the 1951 live telecast of a college football game in the US opened the doors for sportsmen to become idolized and increasingly successful in the financial sense. In turn, this attracted more participants to sports; a self-feeding frenzy that soon produced better sports as events became much more competitive.

Between communist pride and Western commercial interests, the frenzy in sports also led sportsmen to cheat, resorting to steroids and banned drugs with a view to performance enhancement. In communist countries, the penalty for getting caught was nothing more than a slap on the wrist, the ongoing damage to bodies was another matter altogether being the subject of basic denial. Meanwhile in the West, commercially induced cheating produced a mini-boom in demand for chemistry graduates albeit in areas far removed from their usual spots in foul-smelling school labs.

The reason any of this became relevant in the rest of the world is of course the effect that cheating had on the aspirations of the young as well as the social commentary that inevitably followed. Sportsmen who cheated lost their fan following (at least in the past they did) but also elicited broader comparisons going back to their social or ethnic groups; in some cases it became the subject of national scandals.

Virtuous non-participation
With all this cheating going on, many countries and societies have fallen by the wayside of modern sports. I wrote in the previously cited article [5] about the poor record of Indian sportsmen, concluding that the lack of economic incentives explained their lack of participation not to mention excellence. About the only sport that Indians seem to be any good in is cricket, and herein lies the rub for the most recent terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Indian cricketers are paid substantially more than those in any other nation playing the sport; more importantly they are also reportedly in the top echelons of the country's own population when it comes to oversized pay. This puts them in the same category as American baseball and football stars, not to mention the ubiquitous basketball legends of the Michael Jordan variety.

All that wealth in an Asian sport clearly attracts attention, of the type that Islamic terrorists revel in. Far from an ideological conflict involving sports per se (although enough Wahhabi scholarship holds that sports activities are frowned upon) the issue is more subtle, involving the attention span of a people used to diversions.

In any poor country, the general time allocated to sports, leisure or entertainment activities is relatively small, which means that avid spectators are unlikely to also care about more serious topics such as religion and politics. That fear of marginalization, more than any specific political agenda, justifies the attention of Islamic terrorists who would like nothing more than keeping their support pipelines thick and strong with embedded national outrage.

In contrast, a people inured to the ups and downs of sports are unlikely to support extremism in its many forms. Good sportspeople respect their competitors, as do good spectators however fervent their support for the home team may be. People without much interest in sports - playing or watching - are more likely to indulge in violence: although ironically that observation reverses when we discuss peoples rather than the propensity of specific individuals to violence [6].

This then is the actual battleground. As Pakistanis suffer further damage on their economy due to the economic crisis, their sporting aspirations are also being dented, in turn pushing more young people into the path of the fundamentalists to recruit, train and utilize as cannon fodder.

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

MS Dhoni Comes Under Attack From Former Cricketers

By Danish Sher Khan / Mumbai

Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni has come under sharp attack from some former cricketers for his alleged conflict of interest for having stakes in the sports management company which handles him and three of his Indian teammates.

MS Dhoni found himself in a controversy when it came to light that he had 15 per cent stake in Rhiti Sports, which also manages Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja and Pragyan Ojha, besides the Indian captain. However, the firm has made it clear that Dhoni was a shareholder only for a brief period, and currently has no stakes.

But former Indian cricketers and sports management executives feel that Dhoni should not put himself in such a position where questions could be raised about a possible conflict of interest.

"Obviously, the documents that have come out indicates that it has been a conflict of interest as far as Dhoni's involvement with Rhiti Sports is concerned," former Indian cricketer Kirti Azad told INN.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Is Delhi Govt Prejudiced Against Differently-Abled Players?

By Siddhi Sharma | INNLIVE

The Constitution secures to the citizens, including the differently-abled, a right of justice, liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship, equality of status and of opportunity and for the promotion of fraternity. But is this thought meant only to fill up pages of our constitution booklet ? Or does it hold some relevance and truth? Does our nation uphold its constitutional rights?

In an analysis done by INNLIVE, we have come across some shocking revelation . There are lots of voices , unheard. There are lots of sports people, falling in the category of the differently abled, who have made our nation proud, are suffering this bias. In such scenario, do we even have rights to call ourselves a citizen of a nation who believes in equality? When every ounce of the definition has been compromised?

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Will Indian Politicians Ever Stop Using Champion Athletes For Personal Glory?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

Fights over Sakshi Malik, PV Sindhu and Dipa Karmakar highlight the disturbing mentality of our political class.

It is said that history only remembers the winners. History may well be kind to victors, but there is one section of society which uses them like trending topics on Twitter or Google, shamelessly riding their popularity to draw attention to themselves.

Friday, June 30, 2017

Islamic Style: How The Hijab Has Grown Into Fashion Industry?

Muslim spending on fashion is expected to touch $488 billion by 2019.

Nike, the well-known US sportswear company, recently introduced a sports hijab. The reaction to this was mixed: there are those who are applauding Nike for its inclusiveness of Muslim women who want to cover their hair, and there are those who accuse it of abetting women’s subjugation.

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

MS Dhoni’s Two Options: Step Down Or Sell 'All' Stakes

By Omer Shah / Mumbai

Why does Mahendra Singh Dhoni not feel the need to clarify anything? From poor field settings to lack of intent to bad management practices? Well, one might argue that like BCCI president N Srinivasan, he too feels he is innocent of all charges. So in his mind, he has done no wrong and that means he doesn’t need to answer any questions. But that seems far from the harsh truth.

After the Economic Times broke the story about the Indian skipper’s 15 percent stake in Rhiti Sports, the sports marketing/management company responded with a statement to clear the air. “As on date, MSD holds no shareholding in Rhiti Sports Management (P) Ltd. However, it is made clear that shareholding was allotted to MSD on 22.03.2013 only to secure certain old outstandings which were due for more than one year.

“Further, the payments were cleared in April 2013 and the shareholding was transferred back to promoter of the company on 26.04.2013,” Rhiti Sports chairman Arun Pandey said in the statement.

Sunday, November 02, 2014

Special Report: Is The Spirit Of Sport Dying?

Sport has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. Cheating, absence of the sporting spirit in competitions, and scant respect for opponents seem to be on the rise globally. What is shocking is that penalties seem to have little effect on potential troublemakers while more and more people are approaching courts of law for redressals, more so abroad.

Some incidents involving sports persons in foreign land range from the usual to the bizarre. This year, Florida State baseball team suspended one of its players, Jameis Winston, for “stealing” 32 dollars worth of crab legs and crawfish from a supermarket after the issue was taken to a court. The recent local headlines included Atletico de Kolkata footballers and coach behaving in an unsportsmanlike manner in the ongoing Indian Super League.

Monday, April 08, 2013

Qatar Olympics - Past and Present

QMA’s Qatar Olympic & Sports Museum (QOSM) will open the largest exhibition of its kind showing both ancient and modern Olympic Games and narrating the history of the Olympics in ancient Greece and their re-establishment in modern times. 

On display from March 28, 2013 to June 30, 2013 at ALRIWAQ DOHA exhibition space, the OLYMPICS – Past & Present exhibition includes two different sections highlighting ancient Olympia and the modern Olympic Games. Organised in partnership with ExxonMobil Qatar, the exhibition is the first of its kind to showcase a large number of objects from the collections of the Qatar Olympic & Sports Museum and QMA’s Media Collections. Additional pieces from around the world including Greece, France, Germany and Italy complement the exhibit.

“For the first time, an exhibition showcases the cultural history of the ancient and modern Olympics on such a scale, not to mention a special section on Qatar’s participation in the world-class event,” said Dr. Christian Wacker, Director of the Qatar Olympic & Sports Museum. “ExxonMobil has shown its dedication to sports in Qatar in various local events and we welcome the opportunity to cooperate with such a committed partner.”

“Partnering with the Qatar Olympic & Sports Museum to organise the Olympics – Past & Present exhibition in Doha provides a great opportunity to emphasise both tradition and sports - two critical values shared by the State of Qatar and ExxonMobil,” said Alistair Routledge, Vice President of ExxonMobil Qatar Inc. “I am confident that patrons of the exhibition will enjoy their journey through 2700 years of Olympic history – a legacy celebrated by tradition and camaraderie.”

The ancient section of the exhibition, Olympia: Myth – Cult – Games, takes visitors on a journey through the history of ancient Olympia with more than 600 original objects from Greece and international museums.Through this section, visitors can explore the sanctuary of Olympia, its role in ancient Greece, find out more about the Greek culture and the festivals held in Olympia. They are invited to discover the program of the ancient Games and practice some contemporary disciplines. These galleries showcase statues, vases, and bronzes depicting athletes and athletic activities as well as models of Olympia which illustrate the sequence of events.

The modern part, Olympics: Values – Competitions – Mega Events, sheds a light on the rediscovery of Antiquity during the Renaissance, leading to the re-establishment of the Olympic Games in the 19th century and their development to the present.

Visitors can immerse themselves in a comprehensive display of all the torches, posters, mascots, medals, programs and tickets from the last 48 Winter and Summer Olympic Games. This section of the OLYMPICS – Past & Present exhibition illustrates values and rituals of the Olympics promoting peace and personal achievements, as well as the broader context of this Mega Event and its interrelationship with politics, environment, economics, social issues and doping. The exhibition showcases original films and images from all the Olympic Games and highlights the participation of Qatari athletes in these Games through a series of interviews with previous and current Qatari Olympians and Paralympians.

An extensive three-month program including gallery lectures, a theatre performance, a film festival as well as a family fun day will complement the exhibition. The gallery lectures will cover topics related to the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Amongst the highlights is a lecture by Qatari athletes Nada Wafa Arkaji and Ibrahim Ismail, who will speak about their experiences becoming Olympic athletes. The classical Greek play 'Medea' by Euripides will be performed on April 11, 12 and 13, 2013 at the exhibition venue. Directed by Professor Ann Woodworth of Northwestern University in Qatar with an international cast, the play will take the audience on a universal and timeless journey of a woman seeking justice. The family day on April 19 offers fun activities and competitions for all ages.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Explainer: What Is Traumatic Brain Injury And How Is It Treated?

Life-threatening brain injuries are thankfully rare in cricket and other sports, even those that involve collisions. But Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes' tragic accident yesterday shows how little control players have over these events.

It also highlights the importance of getting immediate medical attention whenever someone suffers a blow to the head that leads to altered consciousness.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Women's Kabaddi Still Fighting Its Place In Man's World

By SHAZIA JAMEEL | INNLIVE

#WomenKabaddi: It has been three weeks since U Mumba beat Bengaluru Bulls to win the second edition of the Pro Kabaddi League.

It brought to an end a surprisingly successful campaign for the Star Sports and Mashal Sports-run league. It actually saw an increase in viewership - something only the Indian Premier League cricket tournament had managed so far.

Sunday, November 03, 2013

Insight: Saina Nehwal Set To Split From Rhiti Sports Firm?

By Arun Sharma / INN Live

The big ticket deal between Saina Nehwal and sports management firm Rhiti Sports, seems to have hit rough weather within a year and both the parties could be heading for a split. 

Rhiti Sports, which also manages cricket stars like Indian captain MS Dhoni, Suresh Raina and Ravindra Jadeja, had signed a Rs 40-crore deal with the badminton ace in September last year after the 23-year-old became the first Indian shuttler to win an Olympic medal in London. She was also the first non-cricketer to sign a contract with Rhiti Sports.