Recently there was an international beach volleyball tournament held at Chennai with teams participating from many countries in Europe, Asia and USA. Some teams had participated in Beijing Olympics and some had won international tournaments.
I am interested in volleyball so I went to see the matches. It was interesting and in sharp contrast to the Commonwealth Games starting in Delhi tomorrow. The volleyball tournament of course was far smaller in scale. There was only one “beach” stadium with 6 courts, makeshift stands. And competition money was probably less than $100,000 for all the teams put together. The organizers did not mention the schedule of the tournaments so one went there to watch whichever match was being played.
I saw a white couple with a small (about 4 year old) Indian boy. They seemed to be family. The woman and the child were talking to each other and very comfortable with each other. I was wondering how they were communicating. Which language? I never did find out till the end. But it was interesting to see the small boy sitting on the “mother’s” lap and chatting with her.
I was watching an Indian woman’s team play against a German team (many countries were represented by more than one team). The Indian team had one player who was lean, tall and dark who played pretty well. The other Indian player was quite short and stout and not nimble enough to play at this level. Quite an odd combination of players in that team.
Of course the Indian women were conservatively attired and not in biks (femmo's abbreviation for bikinis) as the other women were.
Later I was talking to one of the players. I asked him where he was from. He said he was from Greece. I asked him whether he liked Chennai and whether this was his first time in Chennai. He said yes he liked Chennai but it was too hot. I wondered what he would have said if he had come to Chennai in the middle of summer (in April/May).
On the whole the tournament was fairly well organized (it was certainly not a world class stadium by any stretch of imagination), the “stadium” was created by cordoning off a section of the beach with a temporary perimeter constructed around it. I think the players had a fairly good time playing here.
When I was taking pictures (videos actually), I came to appreciate the difficulty in tracking the ball closely. I had to ensure that the camera was following the ball and that the ball could be seen at all times (while I realized this, I didn’t do a great job of it). And I also had to zoom in to get close to the action. And if I zoomed in then tracking the ball became much more difficult. Optimizing the two was quite difficult and I was very apprehensive about the (quality of) pictures I took. When I watched the replay I breathed again. They didn’t turn out as badly as I had expected. The video shooting of the game was an interesting exercise, quite an eye opener for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment