heroes ...

the olympics really is the time for the real heroics to come out ... the athletes seem to step it up a notch ... i have been watching the olympics on tv, and seeing how proud the athletes feel when their national anthem is played out, and their country's flag raised. i dream often of listening to jana gana mana while the indian tricolor is raised. alas, such opportunities are only in dreams - and i missed the flag raising at rathore's silver medal presentation. hockey has been a disappointment, and lea-hesh lost a heartbreaker.

but on the whole, its been exciting to watch, inspite of NBC's coverage. and at times, if there isn't enough technical merit, its compensated by high drama. this is certainly true of the tennis competition, especially on the men's side. i have been watching plenty of olympic tennis over the weekend - and there certainly were some heroes ... coming into this weekend, chile was a country that had never ever won an olympic gold. after some unbelievable heroics by two men - fernando gonzales and nicolas massu, they now have two gold medals and a bronze in these games. both of them spent about 7 hours each on court on a single day, and showed an indomitable never say die attitude, and won, inspite of being down facing matchpoints.

gonzales beat taylor dent in the bronze medal singles game - a match that went 16-14 in the final set, and lasted more than 3.5 hours. withing two hours, gonzales was back on court, teaming with massu against germans schuettler and kiefer for the doubles final. they were down four matchpoints in the 4th set tie-break, but showed some amazing guts to come back from the dead, and win 6-4 in the fifth, giving chile their first gold medal ever. the match finished in the wee hours of sunday morning. massu was back on sunday evening for the singles gold medal game against a fresh mardy fish. another drama filled match, massu showed cramps, nearly gave up with exhaustion, and frustrated mardy fish into smashing a racket before winning a five setter for another gold in a 4 hour classic.
it was a phenomenal performance, and even the american commentator (jim courier) acknowledged it to be the most amazing physical effort by a tennis player - ranking above pete sampras's epic 3 day marathon to win the davis cup for the USA in moscow.

to put massu's effort in perspective, he has played 11 matches in the past 8 days - gruelling mentally exhausting encounters. and has been on court for about 25 hours. that level of effort is unbelievable. i myself play a lot of tennis, and i cannot even imagine the exhaustion accompanying that kind of effort - not to mention the physical abuse on the legs by playing on hard courts. the guy had not won a hard court match this year coming to the olympics, never won a major competition, and walked away with the biggest prize of them all, from a field that included federer and roddick. i think that his and gonzales' effort was nothing short of heroic ... as boris becker said : the fifth set in a major competition is all about heart and ceases to be about tennis - and these two chileans, spurred on by a faithful chilean fan contingent certainly showed loads of heart ... and it was quite amazing watching them get their gold ... and seeing the delight as their flags went up ... and their national anthem played ...

again, all i could think of was ... what a proud moment it would have been to see leander and mahesh there, watching the tricolor listening to jana gana mana .... with no one else likely to bring in a medal, perhaps it will have to wait till beijing ... but then heroes come out of nowhere, perhaps there is an indian athlete who might just fulfil the aspirations of a billion people before the flame is extinguished in athens ...