Rubber ring championship

And to get a new week started in style ... Friend visiting Hyderabad on work sent me this message this morning, reproduced verbatim.

btw, last night, i was channel surfing after the argentina game. i was hoping DD sports will carry some sania or saina matches. instead they were showing the national sub-junior tenny coit championships - pondy vs. orissa. the latter won in an exciting finish when the 8yr old did a backhand toss to the far corner.

i used to play it at as a tiny tot (for those in the dark, you toss a rubber ring over a net. no fancy gear, rackets, shoes needed. any rubber ring would work) and had forgotten what the game was called. i gave it up to take up badminton and soccer. what a shame, to think i might have tried out for the nationals.

wonder if there is a gilli danda national championship. the fun continues.

Tennycoit, yes. The charms of DD. I'm looking to dye my hair greyer than it is, pull a few teeth, grab a crutch and wander over to enter the tennycoit over-85 national championships. I figure it's my best chance to both be a national champ at something and appear on national television.

All in all it reminds me of one late night that I was watching the women's marathon event at the Barcelona Olympics (1992). On DD of course, because this was before the days of wall-to-wall coverage on 5621 different channels. It was an exciting event, came down over the last few km to a race between two women, Valentina Yegorova representing the "Unified Team" of former Soviet bloc states, and Yuko Arimori of Japan.

They kept exchanging the lead and it was hard to say either lady held an advantage and they exchanged the lead again, and this was edge-of-the-seat stuff, the way these two were giving their all to get ahead, and then the camera showed them disappearing into the tunnel leading into the Olympic stadium. The last leg of the marathon was one lap around the stadium, and the two women would now battle it out over that lap till the finish line ...

... and just as they were about to emerge from the tunnel, the image gently faded to a woman in a sari with her hands folded. "Namaste", she said, and informed us that it was midnight and DD's broadcast day was over. It would have been no more than another minute before the marathon was done, but hey, perish the thought of DD extending its broadcast day one more minute!

No internet. My shortwave radio was then on the blink. Papers next morning did not carry the result. You can imagine my frustration. "This hard-fought race," says the wikipedia page on Arimori, "was the closest finishing time in Olympic history for men or women at that time."

So you see, I'm glad DD now broadcasts after midnight as well, ensuring that we shall never miss a single moment of the subjunior tennycoit championships.