How does record wicket-taker Kapil Dev maintain a blistering physical pace at an age when cricketers usually hang up their bats?
Body language
FEBRUARY 25 had Kapil Dev Nikhanj heaving with a cough and cold, an evil combine that has probably tripped up more sports performances than any other human malady. Others would have called it a day: Kapil Dev did six laps around the Wankhede Stadium in Bombay's muggy, polluted heat. The cough and cold fled and he subsequently became one of the more enthusiastic participants in the conditioning camp for the New Zealand tour.
Exactly 17 days before the cold, Kapil had taken his 432nd Test wicket and busted Sir Richard Hadlee's record set during the 1988-89 series in Bangalore. This at 35 - an age when galloping atrophy forces a cricketer to hang up his bat, when his fat:muscle ratio mutinies, his shoulder muscles pack up under inflammation, his knee rages under weight, his wrists creak, his back is as stiff as a plank. Lately, for Kapil, too, outswingers have become difficult, and he has lost rev over the years.
"His determination is unbelievable," says Ali Irani, the Indian crick- et team's official physiotherapist. "At times, I've felt that even when he was only 60 per cent fit, he has played the match and produced results." Kapil has missed only 13 days of international cricket.
In June 1990 came Kapil's medical apotheosis: the entire Indian team underwent a battery of physiological tests - aerobic capacity, the treadmill, motor ability, strength, fat analysis, and pulmonary and cardiovascular fitness - and Kapil was in the first three, despite being the elderly codger of the team, says P S M Chandran of the Sports Authority of India (SAI).
Chandran observes that of the three body types - ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph - starting from marathoner lean and running to surno fat, Kapil is the average of both extremes. "The mesomorph," says Gursharan Singh, the former cricket coach at the National Institute of Sports, "has the best potential to develop into a pace bowler."
His weight: height ratio falls well
within the optimum 1710 per cent
differential range. Oscillating tightly
between 72-74 kg and 6ft l in tall, he
has kept himself ideally just below
par. A computerised fat analysis conducted by Irani on the Indian squad
showed that he came well within the
prescribed 13-15 per cent of body
weight. He has a benignly slow heart-
beat range between 46-50 - 72 is
normal - and a blood pressure of
120/80. He shares with Mohammad
Azharuddin the highest threshold of
pain in the team.
Irani insists on uniform morning
limbering-up and warming-up exercises lasting up to 45 minutes before
match play. "No joint, no muscle is
spared. It makes a bowler more
mobile. It increases
blood supply, enhances
circulation, provides
nourishment to the tissues and makes the
bowler more flexible,"
he says. And he enforces
a hard diet with a high
carbohydrate content
(70-80 per cent), complemented by a daily dose
of multivitamins.
Independently too,
Kapil keeps up his end
of the bargain: no greasy
food, few sweets and soft
drinks (despite an
endorsement in various
industry commercials),
and no smoking.
But Kapil has his
Achilles Heel - his
right knee, where he has
had repeated trouble
with the shock-absorbing
lateral and medium
miniscus, casting a deep
shadow over his career.
He cannot entirely
manoeuvre the knee and
has lost full movement
in the right leg. And age, a ruthless degenerative process, has taken its toll: his right shoulder triceps and biceps are chronically inflamed.
But Kapil is said to be emotionally unflappable: he has countered
depressives like losing his captaincy
in 1983 soon after the triumphant
Prudential World Cup campaign,
and he and his wife Romi's
inability to have a child. In fact, say
psychologists, it is quite likely that
his failure in one important social
sphere has driven him to excel in another.
N K Chadha of Delhi University,
who has innovated a sports-specific
"ego-gram" for measuring "psychometric properties", believes that
three significant factors - independence, conscientiousness and the
ability to be relaxed - help determine a sportsperson's calibre. "I
would think that the adult ego state
is the dominating factor in Kapil," he says.
Sanjeev Sahni, sports psychologist with SAI's Human Performance
Laboratory at Delhi's Jawaharlal
Nehru Stadium says that a successful
sportsperson has less reaction time,
more arm-hand coordination, sports
aggression (the "killer instinct"), balanced anxiety, perception, attention,
self-arousal control and mental
imagery. Sahni now seeks the opportunity to clinically examine
Kapil using psycho-diagnostic instruments, so that Kapil's parameters
could be established as the bench-mark for succeeding generations of
pacers.
Inputs by Rakesh Kalshian
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