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.”
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
Taiwan’s top table tennis player Lin Yun-ju made his debut in the US professional table tennis scene by taking on a new role as a team’s co-owner. On Wednesday, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), founded in September last year, announced on its official Web site that Lin had become part of the ownership group of the Princeton Revolution, one of the league’s eight teams. MLTT chief executive officer Flint Lane described Lin’s investment as “another great milestone for table tennis in America,” saying that the league’s “commitment to growth and innovation is drawing attention from the best in the sport, and we’re
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
RSS