Defending A Title

Folks,

My apologies for not being regular over last few weeks , the Internet connection back home is still not up and running .

I have heard that if you are a defending champion in any kind of a sport or an event , they say you have to soak the pressure of defending the title and people's expectation. As always when somethings are said its hard to understand until such time that one has a practical experience.

Yes, I had a hands on experience of defending a title yesterday.

Since last year , we have an annual quiz event in our organization. Last year , our team won by a narrowest of margin, we won by one point. This year the quiz was conducted yesterday and we were overwhelming favourites to win the quiz.

As you can imagine the pressure was on our team from the word go , to first get through the preliminary round and to make sure that we get into the finals which we did reasonably well. Although we did make couple of obvious mistakes in the preliminary stage.

Into the finals pitting against eight teams, the whole crowd expected us to win hands down , as one can imagine expectations rise sky high in no time . There were five rounds in all and by the end of round one , we were sixth with four points . We did not miss any questions but other teams did well.

Come round two , we still were in sixth . Round three came and we we just notched up couple of places to move into fourth place. We could have capitalised even better had it not been for the nerves to get the better of us in couple of questions.

There was a eerie calm before the start of round four we still had a mountain to climb , the deficit between first placed team and us were twelve points , we were focused and calm , we scored ten points and moved equal to second placed team and two points adrift the top team.

Come the last round , we were not leading and we missed the first direct question again due to pressure we knew the answer but blurted out the wrong one , fortunately for us none of the other teams got it right , so positions remained the same. Then came the real magic , The first placed team got one question half right to score two more points and we got three rebuttals and answered all three to go seven points clear with one question remaining which for reasons other than being tricky one , none of the teams answered and we were finally relieved to have defended the title. Although not in the best possible way but still results is what counts.

This was just an ordinary quiz amongst colleagues nothing major was at stake , i just sank and thought about what it would be like to be a Roger Federer , Sachin Tendulkar, Valentino Rossi or could be any major sporting icon . It would be like a pressure cooker and they absorb those pressure time and again . These people have done this for years now and that too in front of millions of their fans ... Phew that's phenomenal feat and an achievement in my view of epic proportions.