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Mirza and Karthikeyan's rise redefines the boundary of India's cricket obsession

A female tennis player and a Formula One driver are the subcontinent's new idols, writes Justin Huggler in Delhi

Tuesday 29 March 2005 00:00 BST
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She has been called India's equivalent of the Tiger Woods phenomenon. Everywhere she goes, she is mobbed by adoring fans - so much so that her mother had to intervene to ask for police protection for her. In a single week, she was offered sponsorship deals from 18 different companies worth a total of almost £1m.

Not bad for someone whose greatest sporting achievement so far has been getting knocked out of the Australian Open tennis tournament in the third round, and who was still ranked No 134 in the world when all those sponsorship offers came in.

Yet Sania Mirza, India's 18-year-old tennis star, is labelled "the new icon of Indian sports". Already the Indian press is talking about "Sania mania".

It is the same for Narain Karthikeyan, India's first Formula One racing driver. Suddenly Karthikeyan's face is everywhere in India, plastered across billboards and popping up every few moments in television adverts. Quite a profile, considering he has only just broken into Formula One, and finished 15th in his first race.

Mirza and Karthikeyan are being showered with the sort of attention only champions get in most other countries. But if they both have a long way to go to prove themselves in their respective sports, in Indian terms they are both champions.

The degree of adulation Mirza and Karthikeyan are receiving is a measure of just how little success India has achieved in any sport outside cricket and, to a lesser extent, hockey, in recent decades.

At the Olympic Games last year, India, a country of more than a billion people, managed just one silver medal, in shooting. And it was the first individual silver India had ever won. As the Games came to an end, and countries counted up their medal tallies, India's media was left plaintively asking how it was that a country with India's resources - the second-fastest growing economy on the planet - and sheer population size, could do so badly.

Now Indian sports fans are wondering if 2005 is the year all that is going to change, with not one but two bright new hopefuls on the horizon. India has finally started to live up to its economic potential, after years of disappointments. Now Indians hope it may start living up to its sporting potential too.

Of the two it is Mirza who has captured the national imagination more completely - in large part because her arrival on the scene was so meteoric. Only six months ago, barely anyone had heard of her. Then she managed to reach the third round of January's Australian Open on the back of a wild card entry - the best any Indian woman has ever done in a Grand Slam event.

Mirza also has time on her side. At just 18, she may have a lot yet to prove but she has time to prove it.

Both she and Karthikeyan have whipped up unprecedented interest in their sports here. There used to be only been one sport on Indian television: cricket. It still dominates schedules in a way no other sport does anywhere in the world. In India, when there is no live Test match on, they show old Tests. And not just the highlights - they show practically every ball of a Test that took place three years ago.

But suddenly India has gone tennis-mad. Even before Karthikeyan's arrival on the scene, Formula One was the second most watched sport in India and now that he is involved, viewing figures are growing even more.

If Mirza and Karthikeyan fall short of the heights of adoration enjoyed by the batsman Sachin Tendulkar - who probably plays with more weight of expectation on his shoulders than any other sportsman in the world - they are being fêted everywhere they go like Bollywood stars.

India has had tennis stars before - many years ago, and they were all men - and Karthikeyan's own father was a successful rally driver. But the reason behind the two new stars' huge popularity is partly that they have arrived after this long drought in Indian sporting success, and partly that they have arrived on the scene at a time when Indian society is changing.

With its economy booming, India has a large and growing middle class with the time and money to spend on sports like tennis. And if few can aspire to motor racing, the days are gone when the only car on the Indian roads was the graceful but slow Hindustan Ambassador, modelled on an old Fifties-era Morris. Today there is a burgeoning and competitive new car market which provides plenty of potential sponsors for the likes of Karthikeyan.

It is all summed up rather neatly by a television advert for engine oil in which Karthikeyan appears. The racing driver is sitting at the wheel of a saloon outside an Indian hotel when a Bollywood star, looking for her car, mistakes him for the chauffeur. He protests but the actress's companion orders him to get them to the airport "chelo fast" - chelo is Hindi for "let's go".

Karthikeyan duly obliges with a display of high-speed cornering that leaves the Bollywood pair looking a lot less composed and glamorous. The sting comes when they get to the airport: it is Karthikeyan the paparazzi are waiting for, not the Bollywood stars.

That says much of the changing attitudes in a country where, until Karthikeyan arrived on the scene, being a professional driver meant being a chauffeur, a servant for the rich and powerful. This is a country where, until a few years ago, to be physically fit was an indicator of social inferiority, a manual labourer. But that is changing too, with smart new gyms opening up in Delhi and other major cities.

Karthikeyan was groomed from an early age in his chosen sport, but there is something gloriously amateurish about Mirza's star in tennis, a sport she first played out of curiosity on the way to the swimming pool.

Both, inevitably, come from wealthy, middle-class backgrounds. Funding for the poor to make it in sports other than cricket in India is non-existent, depressingly illustrated by India's brightest swimming prospect tragically committing suicide last year because the government would not pay for surgery she needed on an injury that would otherwise end her career.

Karthikeyan and Mirza may never achieve the worldwide acclaim in their their respective fields as Tendulkar, but if their legacy is that the Indian people - and authorities - can see beyond the all-powerful institution of cricket for sporting fulfilment, then India may yet, one day, celebrate Olympic gold.

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