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Faster, higher, stronger, greater: Why the Olympics stand apart
More than 10,000 skilful humans will gather in Paris for the biggest secular gathering on earth.
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This Games remains deeply jingoistic, is often drug-laced, can be intermittently pompous, has an absurdly elevated bill and used to be unforgivably sexist.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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On an August day in 2008, the telegrams – think of them as short, quick-travelling, printed messages – began arriving at the young man’s home in the north Indian city of Chandigarh. They came in handfuls, then sackfuls. A hundred, a thousand, finally over 300,000 of them. Think of them as love letters from his nation.
First he was stunned, then he was moved. He was a shooter, for God’s sakes, a motionless, expressionless sporting nerd, who even as a world champion could walk down most Indian streets unrecognised. Yet now families were sending him marriage proposals. Now telegrams, many just marked “Abhinav Bindra, Chandigarh”, were somehow making their way to him.
