didnt have any problems and one had the problem twice, he

The sight of Sachin Tendulkar in Rio recently caused quite a flutter in the cricket world. What did the sighting of him with IOC chief Thomas Bach at a Rugby sevens match mean? Other than the Great Ts duties as the Indian Olympic Associations (IOA) goodwill ambassador. Was cricket making a pitch for the Olympics by sending in its biggest living superstar?Should cricket even be played under the tent of the Big O? Did the Big O want the sport in? Could T20 be the new Rugby sevens?Turned out Tendulkar was in Rio not as a cricketing emissary of either the ICC or the BCCI. His duty as Indian Olympic goodwill ambassador was to pep up Indias athletes and mingle with the upper echelons of the Olympic Family. La Famille are members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the not-for-profit independent international organisation made up of volunteers that owns and runs the Olympics. During the two weeks the event runs, OF members are awarded head-of-state privileges in the host city.Its a good gig. As it happened, in a curious coincidence, when Tendulkar was in Rio, one of his besties - Nita Ambani, owner of the Mumbai Indians IPL franchise and wife of Mukesh, a regular in the top 50 on the Forbes billionaires list - was elected into the OF as an IOC member from India.World rugbys chief executive, Brett Gosper, reported to the wires that Tendulkar had spent a whole session watching Rugby sevens. Tendulkar loved it and was interested in rugbys journey to the Olympics and why thats an interesting prospect, possibly, for cricket, Gosper said. He was being kind, refraining from exercising rugbys well-established bragging rights. After all, which Commonwealth-centric sport played by a handful of nations at the very top, has an expanding and competitive World Cup, a wide player base, and has made the most of a format that has gone from being considered a tiddlywinks version of the real stuff to a globalisation-magnet?Rugby appears to have found a way past the problems cricket currently wrestles with. The Olympic question was previously somewhere near the bottom of crickets laundry list, but it appears now that there is a bit of a stir round it - for which Tendulkar is not the only one responsible. Once the Olympics have ended and Brazils citizens are left cleaning up after the party and coping with the shock of horrendously large bills, a Very Important Meeting will take place - later in the year, between IOC chief Thomas Bach, ICC chairman Shashank Manohar and BCCI president Anurag Thakur, somewhere in India. No one will talk about it formally, but you heard it here first.The meeting is meant to extend the discussion beyond the broader existential arguments that rise when the words cricket and Olympics are placed in the same sentence. It lies beyond whether cricket needs to bother with the quadrennial event or not. Or, using a phrase copyrighted by colleague Andrew Miller, OlympIN or OlympOUT. The sport, at the moment, is floating somewhere in the netherworld between these two, called OlympHOW on earth?Should it even want to, the earliest Olympics that cricket can make a pitch for is 2024. The announcement of the new sports to figure in the 2020 Games was made a week before the Rio 2016 opening ceremony. They are karate, skateboarding, sports climbing, surfing, and the return of baseball/softball (possibly due to its great traction in Japan). The choice of these new sports owes partly to the need to reel in the young, for whom the modern pentathlon might represent some ancient idiosyncrasy, combined with the logistical ease of putting up temporary venues for these sports.If cricket is interested in making a run for Rome, it must have a blueprint, and must hard-sell between now and the opening ceremony in Tokyo 2020. Which is where the argument gets messy and the matter of cricket wanting the Olympics and/or the Olympics wanting cricket is deemed under consideration and exploratory. Gaining Olympic status comes with conditions attached, which the IOC is within its rights to lay down, but which dont quite serve crickets purpose. The Olympics requires that the sports it hands out medals in bring their best teams and best players. Most sports and nations obediently toe the line. There are some exceptions, like football, which controls its own Olympic destiny and places age restrictions on competitors (all but three players per squad are under 23), or golf, a newbie, which in Rio had to deal with the lily-livered constitutions of its higher-ranked male players - four from the top ten pulled out. For cricket to stick to its best teams and best players defeats the theoretical purpose of its inclusion in the Olympics - broadening the sports presence in non-traditional territories.Someone suggested beach cricket. As if balancing three formats is not headache enough, batsmen and bowlers in swimwear doesnt provide the best solution either.Then theres the infrastructure - drop-in pitches offer a solution, but what about the real estate required around that pitch? Outfield? Stands? Whats the point if no ones watching? Tree falling in a silent forest, and so on. A cricket ground is far more high-maintenance than setting up a temporary skateboarding venue. Or even squashs easily dismantled all-glass courts, which turn up in front of the pyramids of Giza, in Hong Kong harbour, and in shopping malls. The candidate cities for 2024 are Budapest, Paris, Rome and Los Angeles. Of the lot, only LA has turned two baseball grounds into cricket fields.The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that a 2008 briefing paper titled Cricket Within the Olympic Program - A Golden Opportunity for the Development of Cricket and the Olympic Movement was turned down by the ICC board. The sum and substance of it was that there was an East-West divide among the Full Members over cricket in the Olympics.This is not to say that Asian wariness comes from its dislike of the Olympics. India, for one, have gone more than ten days without a medal in Rio, and the country is in a state of deep gloom and introspection. It is safe to say other subcontinental nations are as hooked to the Games if they have medal stakes. Rather, Asian cricketing nations sweat over being involved in Olympics cricket because it instantly makes them answerable to their national Olympic body, and through that, more vulnerable to more intrusive governmental footprints in their operations.The judges of the Indian Supreme Court would agree that the IOA makes the BCCI look like a cross between the efficiencies of Sony Corp and the humane purpose of Amnesty International. As Indias most self-sustaining and most profitable sports body, it is no surprise the BCCI wants zero conversation with the IOA, and thus with Olympic sport.Yet there is more about crickets dilemma over its best possible relationship with the Olympics than the fact that it is limited by Asian shyness. It will require a straightening out of many glitches in the ICCs functioning to let them catch up with the rugby example. Rugby, through its organised, multi-tiered structure of competition and clear qualification pathways for teams to make it to its biggest events, is about five to seven years ahead of cricket. The ICCs multiple tiers of competition and ranking systems are well intentioned and try to serve the smaller nations, but the routes for qualification to its biggest events are muddied and keep being changed. Sixteen teams in a World Cup or ten? Champions Trophy or whats the point? How many teams in the World T20? Unless cricket accepts that insularity at the highest level eventually fosters inbreeding, the sport could be stuck in the same cyclical conversations every four years.What about Sach and Bach, you ask? Who knows: maybe it is another kind of Olympic debut for cricket. Tendulkar is certainly a member of the global sporting elite. What if the next step up for him is a sporting knighthood of sorts: membership - through some category - of the ultimate athletic aristocracy, the IOC? Maybe the OF really liked him. Tony Bradley Jersey . Instead of dwelling on the negative, Oates focused on what was good about the clubs recent play. It worked. Adrian Dantley Jazz Jersey . The team says the Spain international has a muscle pull in his right leg. Barcelona hosts third-division side Cartagena in the return leg of their round-of-32 tie after winning their first meeting 4-1. http://www.jazzauthentic.com/kids-donovan-mitchell-jazz-jersey/ . The showiest items on Calgarys lot were forwards Mike Cammalleri and Lee Stempniak. Both will be unrestricted free agents this summer. Pete Maravich Jersey . The Australian is competing in his final season in Formula One and still looking for his first win this year. He will look to end Vettels run of six straight race wins on Sunday. Webber, who is fifth in the championship, earned his second pole from the past three races and 13th of his career. Jeff Hornacek Jersey . -- Cam Newton pranced into the end zone, placed his hands over his chest and did his familiar Superman pose.Lewis Hamiltons 10th-place starting position for the Russian GP has been confirmed after repairs to his Mercedes engine did not trigger penalties. The world champions power unit has been fitted with a new turbocharger, MGU-H, energy store and control electronics after a failure in qualifying but Hamilton remains inside the five unit limit for each element so no penalty is applied.Hamilton reverts to his first engine used at the Australian GP with Mercedes also chartering a plane to fly a new fuel system to Sochi on Saturday night, with the team needing to introduce replacement parts of the same specification after upgrading their power units for this weekend. The revised power unit was successfully fired up in the Mercedes garage and Hamilton is set to take his place on the fifth row of the grid for the race which begins at 1pm BST, live on Sky Sports F1.Team-mate and championship leader Nico Rosberg starts on pole and is well placed to increase his 36-point championship lead.Speaking on Saturday night, Hamilton appeared downcast about the latest setback to his title challenge, but vowed to fight back in the race from wherever he started.Asked if he was beginning to think 2016 might not be his year after problems at all four grands prix so far, he replied: Im not really thinking of that at the moment, there is still a long way to go.Im always trying to turn negatives into positives and, as I said at the last race, this is another big challenge and the challenge is becoming greater. Every challenge is an opportunity to rise. Mercedes Lewis Hamilton could start near the back of the grid in Russia after suffering yet another power unit failure ahead of Q3 I quite like that approach and even when it seems like its the darkest of days, theres always some light there and as long as you focus on that there will be a brighter day up ahead. Thats how I think, thats how I feel, and thats whats going to power me forwards.ddddddddddddMercedes boss Toto Wolff described the second successive problem in a power unit in Hamiltons car, caused by an overheating MGU-H, as a freak failure given the team believed they had identified the cause of the problem first time round in China.And although the issue has afflicted engines in Hamiltons car so far, Wolff said it was not being caused by the world champions driving.We have eight power units out there. Seven didnt have any problems and one had the problem twice, he added.You need to turn every stone and look at settings, because it happens in the same circumstances in qualifying twice - out laps, not in the race. So I wouldnt exclude any failure, but definitely it is not something that is obvious because we would have found out. Ted Kravitz analyses all the action and looks behind the scenes from qualifying at the Russian Grand Prix. Its certainly not Lewis. You need to look at settings on the MGU-H or any setting that could have an influence on the functionary of the power unit.Wolff also batted away any suggestion the pre-season switch of some crew members between Hamilton and Rosbergs garages had made any impact on the Britons series of setbacks.The crews are doing a great job, he said. We changed the chief mechanic and some other mechanics on the cars, but that has nothing to do with it. Its an unfortunate run of things. Every race live in 2016 Sky Sports F1 brings you every race live in 2016. Fast and easy online upgrade Also See: Hamilton feels helpless Qualifying Report ' ' '