Gujarat | The gene hunt sport

It’s an idea that shot like lightning, or within 10.3 seconds, right into the world’s imagination of sport in a dramatic moment 90 years ago. That was when Jesse Owens messed up the notion of white racial superiority at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The search for the DNA of a champion has been on ever since, tinged by racial notions; India made its own foray with the Special Area Games (SAG) scheme in the 1980s, an ethnic talent hunt that gave us the likes of Limba Ram and Mary Kom. Now Gujarat, an SAG laboratory back in the day, has launched its 21st century spinoff: a five-year Sports Genomics Programme (SGP) to sequence the DNA of 10,000 state athletes across 10 disciplines, hunting for genetic markers that separate champions from the rest.