In a novel protest, Karnataka athlete apologizes to stadium

Earlier this week, a group of sporting enthusiasts in the district town of Yadgiri in northern Karnataka gathered at the Yadgiri District Stadium - not for a match or an athletics meet - but instead for what looked, from a distance, like a funeral rite.

They laid flowers on the stadium's floor and bowed.

It was not a prayer. It was an apology to the stadium, the most prominent one in the district, for failing to save it.

Local television cameras rolled. But behind the strange spectacle lies a story of aspiration curdled by years of administrative indifference.

Training on broken ground

Every morning at 5:30, before Yadgiri's streets have fully woken, Lokesh Rathod walks to the district stadium to coach a small cluster of children who dream of running fast, jumping far and throwing well.

What he sees at the stadium, however, troubles him more with every passing year. "The children come with so much hunger to compete, but I have nothing proper to give them," Rathod says, speaking to The Bridge over the telephone. "I am training champions on a ground that does not even have drinking water."

Rathod, 26, knows what that hunger can produce.

In 2025-26, competing for Vijayanagara Sri Krishnadevaraya University in Ballari, he won a national bronze medal in decathlon at the Khelo India University Games in Jaipur, Rajasthan - the culmination of 15 years in the sport. But the medal came at a cost: with inadequate training infrastructure in Yadgiri, he had to relocate to Bengaluru for years to access a synthetic track and proper coaching, all while commuting between his home district and the state's capital nearly 200 kilometers away.

"When I asked to register as an athlete from Yadgiri, the administrator asked me, 'Where is Yadgiri?'" he recalls. "That is what our district means to Karnataka's sporting establishment."

The stadium he trains at daily is, on paper, a government showpiece. A close look, and the reality is far from magnificent. 

Construction began in 2016-17 and was reportedly declared complete in 2021, funded through the state government and the Kalyana Karnataka Region Development Board (KKRDB), which Rathod estimates disbursed between INR 10 and 15 crore - for a sprawling 43-acre sporting campus.

Yet by his own assessment, comparing the site to its blueprint, roughly half the sanctioned work remains undone.

"It was built without any scientific planning, and the contractors simply left the land unfinished," Rathod says. He and Manjunath Yadav, a former university-level kho kho player, have jointly filed scores of Right to Information (RTI) applications trying to trace where the money went.

Petitions met with apathy

For five years, Rathod has petitioned successive district commissioners for redress, each of which was met with promises of support that never materialized. Earlier this year, he staged a two-day hunger strike outside the stadium; an assistant district commissioner visited and pledged a follow-up meeting within two days - a meeting that never happened.

The group - around 30 protesters - then marched peacefully from Subah Chowk in the city center to the district commissioner's office. "We were made to wait outside the gate for four hours, then pushed further out," Rathod recalls.

When they sat down outside the mini Vidhana Soudha, local police personnel arrived and threatened arrest, in a confrontation that went viral online in the district circles. The then District Commissioner Harshal Goyal - locals claim - reportedly met the group, albeit briefly, took their letter, and simply left.

Despite what Rathod calls a 'peaceful protest', a case was registered against him and fellow activist Punit Raj Kamatagi for allegedly obstructing a government official and on-duty police.

The neglect, Rathod says, extends up the chain of Karnataka's sporting bureaucracy.

The state athletics association, according to him, has never visited Yadgiri, nor has Govindraj, the Member of Legislative Council (MLC) who has served as president of the Karnataka Olympic Association since 2002. The Bridge reached out to Govindraj for a response using the phone lines listed for him on the Indian Olympic Association's website, but received no answer on any of them.

Rathod's own path has been shaped by scarcity.

His father, a tenant farmer, and the family could not sustain the INR 25,000 to 30,000 a month he needed to keep training and competing in Bengaluru.

He eventually gave up active decathlon competition, dropped out of his B.A. university program amid the family's financial strain, and now runs a small fitness center in Yadgiri, training local youth with whatever equipment he can gather. "After I won a national medal, no one from the district administration even called to congratulate me," he says. "We celebrate athletes only when it is convenient."

India intends to bid for the Olympic Games and build a pipeline of world-class athletes. And yet, in places like Yadgiri, that ambition looks like a district with a stadium track made of stone and mud instead of the approved synthetic surface, a swimming pool that changes its water rather infrequently, and equipment locked away for lack of any ground to use it on.

Rathod's protest - flowers offered in apology rather than anger - is a quiet indictment of that gap.

"We are not angry at the stadium," he says. "We are apologizing to it, because it deserved better from all of us, and we could not give it that."