AS the dusty cricket carnival - two limited teams locked in ill-tempered combat - trudged across India's raucous plains, a significant moment occurred in a peripheral sport.
V. Anand lost in the semi-finals of the World Chess Championship, and it was met with a few silent sighs, some perfunctory hand-wringing, and then everyone's remote clicked back onto Tendulkar. Life as we know it.
But it was a tragedy gone unseen, for Anand's exit ensured India, a billion strong, had retreated into sporting oblivion. In the sense that once again, in what is surely a statistical impossibility, we do not own a single (senior) world champion or world No.1 in any sport (perhaps billiards is the exception). There was no furious clucking in disapproval or chest-pounding in despair, or cries that we are being left behind: this too is life as we know it.
But across the oceans, life has a different measure. In Australia, almost absurdly to the outsider, a small wail of disappointment echoed across the continent. In the past month, columnists have scrawled warnings of complacency, commentators have issued reminders of mortality: there is a subtle message being passed that Australia must pull up its sporting socks.
I laughed, in disbelief at their fears but also in admiration at their ambition: Australia, you see, has at present close to 70 world champions, yet still feel 2001 has not been the best of years.
In part they are right. In grim succession over the past few months, they lost the Davis Cup final, failed to qualify for the soccer World Cup 2002, drew a cricket Test series versus New Zealand (which qualifies as heresy), lost in the final of the women's Champions Trophy hockey, and were beaten in two successive rugby union matches since possibly the first time a star was seen in the East.
Of course, most countries might preen at even reaching a Davis Cup final and launch a ticker-tape parade; in Australia, it is failure, a job half done. Winning is their business: that is life how they see it.
Sport in a sense, defines Australia: it is an advertisement of a sweaty work ethic, a sturdy resilience, a gritty combativeness, a powerful patriotism, all values they clasp tightly. Culturally they are not so much bereft as evolving: this is not a land of great poets, dancers, playwrights, philosophers, musicians. Beyond the arts, in science and technology and business they have yet to capture universal imagination.
Instead sport has become their ambassador, their keenest brand, their most significant export: the world's evaluation of Australia, beyond the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House, is still often determined by feats on a playing field.
And despite the hiccups of 2001, they could well still lay claim, and not only by virtue of a limited population (still under 20 million), to being the most successful nation in sport.
Some of Australia's perceived faded lustre has to do with timing: much of sport works in four-year cycles (Olympics, World Championships, Commonwealth Games) and little of import occurred in 2001.
Memories may fade but it should not conceal accomplishment: at present Australia is reigning champions in one-day cricket (World Cup 1999), women's hockey (World Cup 1998), rugby union (World Cup 1999), rugby league (World Cup 2000), netball (World Cup 1999) and, since we are on the topic, Underwater hockey (World Championship 2000) as well. When these cycles come around, only then can we determine a fall, or rise, in standards.
This is no mere convenient justification but a matter of context: the fact remains that the world champion conveyor belt in 2001 was still creaking them out.
The Australian year, for once in recent times, was not cricket. India ended all silly conversations about Steve Waugh's team being the greatest ever; it was a bruising reminder of mortality, yet it did not alter the truth that this team of 11 gifted men (no other nation can say that) remained the world's best by a country mile. In fielding, batting, bowling, toughness, running between wickets, leadership, motivational levels, hunger, commitment, they set an unmatchable standard. Even Zeus had off days.
It meant that the year belonged to Ian Thorpe, whose resemblance to a seal in his black-wetsuit goes beyond mere appearances. Swimming in modern parlance is an un-sexy sport: possibly because the swimmer's art (the rhythmic strength of his kick, the muscular pull of his stroke) is obscured by water.
But Thorpe's size, his size-17 flipper-feet, his articulated ambition to wake up every morning and swim faster than ever before, and his languid, graceful, lethal style - think Jaws out for a Sunday swim - has invigorated swimming. Like Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, he holds us in his thrall. It is one of the measures of genius. He returned from the World Swimming Championships at Fukuoka with six golds, and world records in all his three freestyle events. Australia in total won 13 gold, even for once besting America, and it was an extraordinary achievement.
A male tennis player and a female golfer also lorded over their sports. Lleyton Hewitt, who has a streetfighter's attitude and alas, deportment too, bellowed his way to No.1, winning the U.S. Open and the Masters, and while this was not quite a return to Eden when Hoad-Rosewall-Laver-Emerson-Stolle-Roche ruled tennis, it was a sweet coincidence that like the old days it was an Aussie who had displaced the Yanks (Sampras and Agassi).
Karrie Webb, the golfer, continued to demonstrate that all comparisons with Tiger were not the figment of overactive imaginations fuelled by too much Fosters: she won two majors (and thus 5 of the last 9), thus ensuring that at 26 she is the youngest to win all four majors.
But it is some of the lesser celebrated figures, possibly anonymous to the outside world, that tell an interesting tale. Troy Bayliss won the World Superbike Championships, Peter Roberston the World Triathlon Championships, Michael Diamond the World Shotgun Championships, Dmitri Markov the pole vault gold at the World Athletics Championships, not to mention victories in boxing and at the World Rowing and World Track Cycling Championships.
The lessons for India here are many: firstly, not all these sports are greatly funded, and many athletes work at day jobs for unsubstantial salaries, but rarely is there sulking or pitiful cries of complaint. Unquestionably India has it harder (both monetarily and in facilities) but Australians appear to enjoy the struggle more than we do.
Secondly, though newspapers and the public here are expectedly tilted towards the more conspicuous sports like cricket, they find space for peripheral sportsmen, and follow their progress keenly. Even in defeat they find positives and room for applause: and while this occasionally skews their judgement (Steve Waugh can do little wrong), it is an unqualified support that pushes athletes towards a greater glory.
In India, a caste system of a different sort flourishes in sport: there is cricket and then at the bottom of the ladder everything else. That Gopi Chand should once say he is more appreciated in other countries than India tells a tragic tale. It is twisted equation that restricts us: after all, it is hard to build champions in sports no one cares about.
India's day in the sun will come, it has to. Australia's already has. Not everything about their sport gladdens the heart. But glory is awful hard to argue with.
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