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Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

The last of the melodies has faded over the Sugathadasa Stadium as the athletes and the officials have departed leaving behind a happy truth.

Her mother said last Monday that even as Susanthika Jayasinghe was running the 200 metres she had been chanting ‘pirith’ from her pavilion seat rural Sri Lanka surely came into its own - a mother showering her traditional blessings on a modernist daughter in track wear. Pix by Thilak Perera

In a world splintered and fragmented, sports can still foster a sense of community and bring together however fleetingly people separated by man-made barriers. The magic of the arena still works and the exultation of the struggle still holds although the struggle for gold, silver and bronze might not be quite in keeping with the classical Athenian spirit of what is important being taking part and not winning the race. But these are the realities of a different epoch for gold, silver and bronze have today become national baubles bolstering the self-esteem of nations when even as the pundits are preaching their gospel of a Global Village, national self-esteem becomes steadily inflated in a post bi-polar world.

And as if to triumphantly signal that reality we had all those plucky independent Republics which were once part of the giant monolithic Soviet empire on the field with Kazakhstan even emerging third to China and Qatar. So it is the newly-emergent Republics and the new oil Kingdoms which are posing the challenge to industrial giants such as Japan and old established democracies such as India with China alone reigning supreme, testimony perhaps to its strange experiment with political authoritarianism and a market economy. That then is the political geography of the Asian Athletics Championships.

They may have looked naive but when they were determined and confident and worked as a team they proved that they could be a formidable force as demonstrated by the men’s 4x400 relay team which ran in perfect unison and harmony to bring home the gold.

And perhaps it is athletics which has the best capacity of forging a sense of community. Watching a multiplicity of events in a single arena over several days the spectators are brought together by a sense of communion as underlined by the camaraderie and the cheering, the tumult and the excitement which was evident to anybody over four days in Colombo. What is more they are also privy to an unending spectacle, a kaleidoscope of skin colours, features and physiques, a veritable human zoo passing before them.

In this medley of sounds, skin colours, features and physiques the host country Sri Lanka stood out like a somewhat bucolic but loveable hang-over from a confused past. Most of our athletes were smaller and less sturdy than their counterparts and they were less self assured particularly when they had grown up within the boundaries of Sri Lanka alone. They started off with fierce confidence but lagged behind the more experienced and sophisticated competitors who had been exposed to regional and international contests. They may have looked naive but when they were determined and confident and worked as a team they proved that they could be a formidable force as demonstrated by the men's 4x400 relay team which ran in perfect unison and harmony to bring home the gold.

For what was loveable about the Sri Lankan athletes was precisely their bucolic quality. On their faces and slight bodies they carried the map and contours of rural Sri Lanka, the fields and the streams, the valleys and the dales which make up the vast bulk of the country. Here they were the offspring of peasants produced by remote schools and struggling up from district and provincial level to finally run in the Big City in the regional spotlight and competing with Asia's best. Here was the story of subsistence agriculture and genteel rural poverty, of traditional land taken over by the British for plantation agriculture, of the contraction of rural life and the best talent drifting to the towns in pursuit of the bright neon lights. Born in remote Athnawela off Warakapola in the Kegalle district Susanthika Jayasinghe's first lessons in track and field were when her mother wanted her to do an urgent errand and run to the boutique.

This she did through the paddy fields and rubber estates of a typical rural landscape. And when her mother said last Monday that even as Susanthika Jayasinghe was running the 200 metres she had been chanting 'pirith' from her pavilion seat rural Sri Lanka surely came into its own - a mother showering her traditional blessings on a modernist daughter in track wear. And when Susanthika herself prefaced an answer to a question by Eric Gauder on Rupavahini in her moment of triumph with the remark 'My English not properly good' (and mind you with not the slightest sense of inferiority) a new generation had surely come into its own. Here was a generation deprived of a knowledge of the 'Kaduva' but mockingly turning the weapon against the privileged English-speaking elite.

But what happens when these bright-eyed native sons and daughters come to the Big Bad City? It is both a happy and cruel tale. They do well and cover themselves with national, regional and perhaps even international honours but at a cost, an emotional cost which sometimes is not worth the candle. It nearly broke Susanthika Jayasinghe on the wheel of its urban superiority, bureaucratic rigidity and political patronage. There were the tussles with trainers and officials, collisions with political authority, the bans and the inquiries, the heartbreak and the tears. There were questions of culture shock and upward mobility. Some times you invite great hostility and resentment, even hatred. It was perhaps a testimony to Susanthika's extreme self-confidence and strong will (once she had said that cowards can not make a success of life) that she pulled through but how many others can?

If Sri Lanka's athletics is to reach greater heights it needs not merely better funding and better trainers but also a more acute awareness of the mental state of its athletes sprung from rural stock and thrust into the towns. Better funding, training and more international exposure was needed as last week's championships demonstrated (when it was the few athletes with international exposure who did well) but that by itself is not enough. Officials must also be more sensitive to the sensitivities of the athletes who may be suffering from a sense of culture shock. If that had been there the disastrous insistence that the women's relay team which had just returned from Manchester should undergo further trials could have been avoided and the country could have obtained another gold. Another unlovely trait of our collective backwardness is the sense of cliquism stemming from a sense of national insularity and backwardness which seems to afflict even the urban officials who are proud about their blazered sophistication. It is all well and good for our athletes to come from the village but it is time that both officials and athletes abandoned their narrow outlooks.

Otherwise all would be in vain, the pilgrimage from the village to the town a futile trek. Can bucolic simplicity co-exist with the demands of international competition? Can we succeed in such competitions if we continue to cling to obsolete notions of cliquism? These are the questions to be answered if we are to bring home those national baubles which alone will make it worthwhile for our native sons and daughters to lose their sense of primal innocence.

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