By: Kartikay Dutta
I remember going to watch a cricket match in Indore’s Holkar Stadium in 2011. India vs West
Indies, famous for Virender Sehwag’s ODI double century. As much as Sehwag’s cuts and
straight drives, one memory continues to stand out for me a decade later — some assholes in the
row in front of us jeering at the West Indian players, calling them all sorts of slurs based on the
darkness of their skin.
For West Indian cricket, the question of race is inextricable from the sport — in fact, in many
ways, it was what charged their excellence in the field, especially in the 1970s as most Caribbean
islands gained their independence. Stevan Riley’s seminal documentary Fire in Babylon is a
moving exploration of the questions of black bodies playing a white man’s sport — descendants
of slaves playing the game their invading masters had brought to these shores, and what’s more,
threatening the Englishmen through their success and redefinition of the game. Sports loves an
underdog story, but the West Indies teams of the 1970s were not this. They took the dichotomy of
the victor and the plucky loser and flipped it on its head, becoming the big bad boys of world
cricket — a group of black men, born on the colonizer-controlled Caribbean islands, showing up
in England and winning two World Cups on the trot in 1975 and 1979.
Racism makes its presence felt, in some shape or form, in more or less every global sport, and
becomes a concern time and again. But it is about the individuals and groups which stand out
against it and flip the script on which sport survives — and indeed, thrives, with the best parts of
the loyalty and unity which come with sport rising to the top in these moments. From Jackie
Robinson breaking the baseball colour barrier in the USA in 1947, being the only player to have
his jersey number retired across the entirety of Major League Baseball, to an entire nation uniting
behind three young black men — Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, and Jadon Sancho — after
they missed their penalties in the 2021 EUROs finals, sports history is peppered with moments of
this overarching, greater-than-life story of the true underdog’s spirit manifesting in the struggle
upwards — a celebration of what has been achieved. Equally, the continued open racism
conveyed towards players of colour throughout Europe, or the constant trickle of news such as
that of the accusations of institutional racism Yorkshire County Cricket Club recently faced —
instances like these are far, far too common, and means any celebration must be tinged with a
warning of how much there still is left to fix.
Sports by nature are about separating the wheat from the chaff. It is a search for excellence, a
quest to become the best of the best, of reaching the mountaintop and standing alone. That is
what sports, and those who choose to compete in it, sign up for — a wholly non-inclusive act.
Too often, it’s been allowed to seep away from the games they play and into the narratives which
surround them instead. Taking knees is just a start: top to bottom, there needs to be a
commitment towards a lasting, permanent change in the name of inclusivity and sports for all.