The foreign cheerleaders were brought in to show India’s cricket fans how to shake their pompoms — but not everyone was impressed.
The New Delhi team said on Wednesday it was switching its cheerleaders for a band of drummers. Mumbai politicians have forced theirs to cover up, saying their performances were lewd and not appropriate for India’s traditional culture.
The cheerleaders were flown in to give a touch of glamor to the Indian Premier League — a newly launched cricket tournament that brings together the sport’s biggest international stars, million-dollar contracts, big business and celebrities.
The league has been posited as a celebration of the new India — brash, confident, cosmopolitan and rolling in money from a decade-long economic boom.
Indian liquor baron Vijay Mallya flew in the Washington Redskins American football team’s cheerleaders to boost his team, which he named after one of his whiskeys — the Bangalore Royal Challengers.
Other team owners flew in troops of dancing beauties from Eastern Europe.
For a brief moment all was good. They whirled and bounced and cheered. Miniskirts flared and pompoms shook as cricket players batted balls out of the park.
But it was all too much for the other India — a deeply conservative country where public displays of sexuality are taboo and women are expected to dress modestly.
The backlash began in Mumbai last week when lawmakers from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party pressed to get cheerleaders banned from the home games of the local team, the Mumbai Indians.
“It may be a good thing for America, for the USA, it’s not a good thing for India, for our kind of culture,” said Nitin Gadkari, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s president for the state of Maharashtra.
Police vowed to keep scantily clad dancers out of public view.
“We will take action,” Mumbai police officer Ramrao Wagh said. “The government has said it will not allow obscenities on the field.”
He did not elaborate.
In the end a compromise of sorts was reached.
The away team cheerleaders still wore their tartan miniskirts — but they donned black full-body stockings underneath.
On Wednesday, in an apparent effort to avoid a similar confrontation, the owners of the Delhi Daredevils said they would replace the cheerleaders at the next game with a troop of traditional drummers.
Shriram Ramdas, a spokesman for GMR group — the construction company that owns the Daredevils — declined to explain the decision, except to say the group wanted “to experiment with different forms of entertainment.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier