Category: Sports

Leicester City owner among five dead in helicopter crash

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

Leicester City football club owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was on board a helicopter that crashed outside the club’s stadium, the BBC reported on Sunday, quoting a source close to his family.

The helicopter crashed in a ball of flames in the club’s car park on Saturday after a Premier League match.

Officials from the club and Vichai’s company, duty-free giant King Power International, declined to comment on whether he was in the helicopter when it spiralled out of control and crashed around an hour after the game.

According to eyewitnesses, the helicopter just cleared the top of the stadium before it started to spin. It then plummeted to the ground and burst into flames.

A spokesman for the Midlands club said on Saturday: “We are assisting Leicestershire Police and the emergency services in dealing with a major incident at King Power Stadium.”

John Butcher, who was near the stadium at the time of the crash, told the BBC his nephew saw the helicopter spiral out of control apparently due to a faulty rear propeller.

“Within a second it dropped like a stone to the floor…Luckily it did spiral for a little while and everybody sort of ran, sort of scattered. As far as we are aware nobody around the car park was caught up in this problem.”

In Thailand, officials at King Power said they could not yet comment on the crash or say whether Vichai had been aboard.

Vichai is a huge favourite with the fans after he bought the unfancied side from central England in 2010 and they went on to stun the soccer world by winning the league title in 2016.

According to Forbes magazine he is the fifth richest person in Thailand with an estimated net worth of $4.9 billion.

Leicestershire Police said a team from the Department for Transport’s Air Accidents Investigations Branch had taken charge of the investigation into the cause of the crash.

ENGLISH CHAMPIONS

After pumping millions of pounds into the club, he helped steer them back into the top flight in 2014 before they stunned the sport by beating the likes of Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea to become champions of England.

Leading players in the side, including Jamie Vardy and Harry Maguire, sent messages of support on Twitter while rival clubs including Manchester City also voiced their concern.

Freelance photographer Ryan Brown was covering the game and saw the helicopter clear the stadium before it crashed, the BBC reported.

“Literally the engine stopped and I turned around, and it made a bit of a whirring noise,” Brown told BBC Radio 5 Live. “It turned silent, blades started spinning and then there was a big bang.”

Leicester had played a league match at home against West Ham United earlier on Saturday, drawing 1-1.

The self-made businessman Vichai founded Thai duty-free giant King Power in 1989.

The duty-free business got a big boost in 2006 when it was granted an airport monopoly under the government of then prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and it continued to prosper even after Thaksin’s ouster in a coup that year.

The family’s empire also includes Belgian football club, Oud-Heverlee Leuven.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Sachin vs Kohli: “Greatest of all time” debate is meaningless

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

It is human to compare. Make listicles. Your top-five charts. More often than not, fandom plays a major factor in this. Thus, the world of sports, music, cinema etc… will always have unresolved debates about who is the greatest. Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal? Michael Schumacher or Mika Hakkinen? Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi? And the latest in cricket — Virat Kohli or Sachin Tendulkar?

There are different ways of judging greatness.

1. Statistics
2. Flourish & the “wow” factor
3. Grittiness/match winning performances
4. Competition faced
5. Impact on the sport

Statistics

Stats show that Virat Kohli is easily the greatest one-day international (ODI) batsman ever. And this has perturbed the Sachin Tendulkar camp. In all other Sachin versus Brian Lara versus Ricky Ponting etc… debates the Bhagwaan camp could fall back on stats.

Now, they can’t. Kohli hit the 10,000 run mark recently and did it in just 205 innings. That a staggering 54 innings lesser than the Little Master. Moreover, after 205 innings, Sachin averaged 42 whereas Kohli almost touches 60. Also, Kohli has already hit 37 centuries while Sachin was on 21. There is one stat, however, which marginally pips Sachin ahead and that is percentage of team runs. 17 versus 16… slightly unbelievable, right?

Flourish And The Wow Factor

This is subjective. Some find Lara more attractive than Sachin and some argue the other way. Kohli does possess a couple of “wow” shots in his arsenal. The wristy, almost slap like shot he uses to hit the midwicket boundary with ease being one of them. Sachin on the other hand, was a delight to watch. He had the gift to take your breath away time and again. That straight drive, that punch through the covers and that wristy flick were just sublime.

Grittiness/Match Winning Performances

Again subjective. It is well established that Kohli thrives under pressure. His chasing abilities are already legendary. Sachin is slightly misunderstood in this regard. Out of his 49 ODI centuries, 33 were in winning causes. That’s 70 percent.

Competition Faced

This is the ODI ranking of bowlers when Sachin was at his peak and the number one batsman in 1999.

1. Shaun Pollock, 2. Glenn McGrath, 3. Shane Warne, 4. Curtly Ambrose, 5. Allan Donald.

The top-10 included Saqlain and Muralitharan too. Today, Jasprit Bumrah, Rashid Khan, Kuldeep Yadav, Trent Boult and Josh Hazelwood are at the top.
It is not Kohli’s fault that the bowling standard has dipped slightly. The sports has changed. Runs mean commercial gains. Consider this for a moment. Why aren’t we talking about Viv Richards as the greatest? No safety, bad equipment, green-top wickets, deadly adversaries, that guy dominated in an era when the general mindset was survival.

Impact On The Sport

Some greats change the game for the next generation. Jonty Rhodes is the first example. The art of fielding changed when he flew from Point to almost Gully to dismiss a bewildered Brian Lara.

Sachin has had that impact on ODI batting, Warne revived spin bowling, Waqar Younus and Wasim Akram practically taught the world the art of reverse swing and AB De Villiers and Chris Gayle have done that for T20 batting. Kohli is yet to find a footing here but I suspect the guy will be remembered as the professional of professionals.

Former England captain Mike Atherton wrote about Kohli’s drive for excellence. Apparently, Kolhi compares his body fat percentage with Novak Djokovic, the 14-time grand slam winner who has only 7.5 percent body fat. His peers can only follow his footsteps.

So, stop obsessing about who is the greatest. Enjoy and celebrate what you are seeing as this will end sooner than you know. Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar does not grace the 22-yards anymore.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

The winning tale of gritty Swapna Barman

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

Until that evening in Jakarta when the country celebrated her success with much fanfare, everything about heptathlete Swapna Barman spelt hardship. From extreme poverty to physical deformity of the kind that threatened to time and again derail her ambition, Swapna pushed every odd to its limits on course to become the first Indian heptathlete to win an Asian Games gold.

But by the 21-year old’s own admission, getting a government job, and certainly not a gold medal, was her priority when she set sail.

“When I started with high jump in my locality and used to take part in local competitions back home, my target was to somehow get a government job. That was my dream then,” Swapna told IANS here.

Swapna is the youngest among four children of her parents, who even now struggle to make ends meet. Belonging to the Rajbongshi tribe in North Bengal, Swapna’s mother worked as a maid and doubled up as a plucker in the tea gardens.

Her father, Panchanan Barman, pulled a van rickshaw until he became bedridden following a stroke seven years ago.

“My other three brothers and sisters struggled to make a living. I am the youngest. So my father thought if I eke out something from sports, that would be helpful for the family.

“All I wanted was a small-time job,” said Swapna, who besides financial hurdles had to overcome the hurdle of having six toes in both her feet to produce her career-best performance by logging 6,026 aggregate points from the gruelling seven events spread across two days in August.

“My dream now is to take my country further ahead and make all of you proud,” added Swapna, while continuously stressing that she should not be treated differently now as the journey has just begun.

In Jakarta, she competed with a tape on her right cheek to lessen pain arising out of a tooth infection. “I could not eat anything before my event. I was so ill I cannot tell you. I only knew I had to do this. All these years of struggle rested on this.”

Her story began in a narrow lane between paddy fields that leads to Ghoshpara village where Swapna ran for the first time in her life.

“I got a glimpse of Swapna Barman for the first time in 2011 in Jalpaiguri, which is also my native place. I have a few students there and they told me, ‘Sir take her along with you to Kolkata, she is very good’,” recalled her long-time coach Subhas Sarkar who, among others, has also trained track and field athlete Hari Shankar Roy.

A Sports Authority of India (SAI) trainer since 1992, Sarkar said Swapna’s diminutive stature and stocky built did not impress him initially. It was Raikot Para Sporting Association secretary Samir Das who pushed Sarkar to take her along with him. Swapna used to train here before moving to the SAI Eastern Centre in 2012.

According to Sarkar, Samir — who passed away in June this year — had warned that she would soon start working in the tea garden with her mother if she did not get proper exposure. In a 2011 school meet in Ludhiana, Swapna bagged gold in high jump. Coach Sarkar was still not impressed, but Swapna started to show meteoric growth in the next few years.

“I was surprised to see her talent. In 2012, she scored 57, 61, 63, 67, 71 in high jump. Within two years, she made 2-3 junior national records in high jump. One extraordinary quality she had was her adaptation and following the technique part. She was above average,” Sarkar said.

Sarkar then made the shift for Swapna from high jump to heptathlon.

“Her height was a worry in high jump and, seeing her potential, I was sure she had it in her to win an Asian Games medal. So I decided to shift her to heptathlon.”

In her first event, after the shift, Swapna racked up 4,431 points and got silver at Guntur in 2013.

From then on, Sarkar said, Swapna took off and never looked back.

At the age of 17, Swapna took part in the 17th Federation Cup Senior Athletics Championships and qualified for the Icheon Asian Games in South Korea, scoring 5,400 points in heptathlon.

In the 2014 Asiad, Swapna finished in fifth place with 5,178 points and coach Sarkar felt she was on track to achieve a podium finish in the future.

But as fate would have it, social problems and a career-threatening back injury stretching from 2015 to 2016 forced her to return home and contemplate never taking the field again.

Brought back into the fold by coach Sarkar, Swapna clinched gold in the Asian Athletics championships in 2017 with 5,942 points but performed poorly while aggravating her injury at the World Athletics Championships the same year in London.

Before the Asiad, when all was going according to plan and Swapna was confident of hitting the 6,200-point mark, a spate of injuries ranging from ankle, hamstring, lower abdomen and a Grade 3 meniscus tear during the national camp in Patiala threatened to derail her campaign once again.

But this time, as coach Sarkar said, both of them were determined to not let it go. So Swapna skipped going under the knife, travelled to Indonesia even as Athletics Federation officials were not sure of her fitness, and achieved what she had not set out for in her initial years..

Swapna will have to do it all over again as she targets hitting the 6,300 plus point zone ahead of 2020 Olympics. In 2019, she is unlikely to participate in any major competition as she needs to recuperate fast.

“If I can win gold despite an excruciating tooth ache, I am sure I would do better in future when fully fit,” Swapna declared.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Central Information Commission brings BCCI under RTI

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is covered under the RTI Act and answerable to the people of the country under its mechanism, the Central Information Commission ruled Monday.

The commission, the top appellate body in RTI matters, went through the law, orders of the Supreme Court, the Law Commission of India report, submissions of the Central Public Information Officer in the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports to conclude that the status, nature and functional characteristics of the BCCI fulfil required conditions of Section 2(h) of the RTI Act.

“The SC has also reaffirmed that the BCCI is the ?approved’ national-level body holding virtually monopoly rights to organize cricketing events in the country,” Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu said in a 37-page long order.

He directed the president, secretary and Committee of Administrators to designate deserving officers as central public information officers, central assistant public information officers and first appellate authorities as required under the law.

Acharyulu also directed the BCCI to put in place, within 15 days, online and offline mechanisms to receive applications for information under the RTI Act.

The matter came before him as the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports did not give a satisfactory response to an RTI applicant, Geeta Rani, who had sought to know the provisions and guidelines under which the BCCI has been representing India and selecting players for the country.

“The BCCI should be listed as a NSF covered under the RTI Act. The RTI Act should be made applicable to the BCCI along with its entire constituent member cricketing associations, provided they fulfil the criteria applicable to the BCCI, as discussed in the Law Commission’s report,” he said.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Indian Super League: Kerala Blasters beat Atlético de Kolkata in season opener

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Luka Modric named best male player at FIFA awards

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

Croatian footballer Luka Modric was named the world’s best male player at the Best Fifa Football Awards here.

The Real Madrid midfielder, 33, beat former team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo, now with Juventus, and Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah to the award, BBC reported on Monday.

Modric won his third Champions League title in a row in May and guided Croatia to their first World Cup final in July.

Brazil and Orlando Pride forward Marta won the best female player award.

France’s Didier Deschamps — whose side beat Modric’s Croatia 4-2 in the World Cup final — was named best men’s coach.

Salah received the Puskas award for the best goal, for his effort against Everton in the Premier League at Anfield last December.

Peru’s supporters won the Fifa Fan Award after many thousands of them flew to Russia in support of their nation — playing at the finals for the first time since 1982. This accolade was voted for solely by supporters.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow