“The virtual avatar of Sportstar Aces Awards 2021 excites us”

The Sportstar Aces Awards 2021 will celebrate the consistency of performance and the impact of sports stars in the decade between 2011 and 2020. The unprecedented nature of last year left them with little sporting action to make a true assessment of performance. Hence, this year Sportstar, in consultation with their jury, decided to honour the best performers of the past decade. This edition of the Awards is dedicated to the Giants of the Decade and will be held as a virtual event. 

There are 11 awards under the Popular Choice category that will be open for public voting. These votes will help the jury members gauge the mood of the nation and help them select the winners. There are 12 Jury awards and a Special Recognition award under a new category called Sports for Good, where the work of organisations/ individuals who have used sports for the betterment of society will be recognised. 

Sportstar Aces was launched in 1994 with the vision to celebrate the stars, the future stars and the tireless partners who have dedicated their lives to sports, to realise the dream of making India a sporting nation. The Awards aims to identify and reward the most deserving athletes irrespective of the popularity of the sport. 

Adgully reached out to Ayon Sengupta, Editor, Sportstar, and Suresh Balakrishna, Chief Revenue Officer, The Hindu Group, who spoke at length about Sportstar Aces and what to expect this year. 

The pandemic forced us to take some extraordinary decisions: Ayon Sengupta 

It is a good initiative for Sportstar to institute the Sportstar Aces Awards. What was the motive or objective behind these awards?

Sportstar Aces was launched in 1994 with the vision to celebrate the stars, the future stars and the tireless partners who have dedicated their lives to sports, to realise the dream of making India a sporting nation. The Awards aims to identify and reward the most deserving athletes irrespective of the popularity of the sport. Like the Sportstar magazine offers a ringside view to the world of sport, the Awards reflects the same values, with each sport being considered with top performers – from motorsport to track & field, to racquet sport to para-athletics to cricket and more.

In 2018, to celebrate 40 years of Sportstar, the awards were reimagined and launched with the tagline ‘Celebrating Excellence in Sports’. The unprecedented nature of 2020 left us with little sporting action to make a true assessment of performance. Hence, in consultation with our esteemed jury, we decided to honour the best performers of the past decade. The 2021 edition is a dedication of the Indian sporting‘Giants of the Decade’. 

What are the parameters that you have set to give these awards for the last decade? Who are the jury members for the final awardees?

We have 11 Awards under the Popular Choice category, which is open for public voting. We take the votes of the sporting fans very seriously and it acts as a broad guiding light for our Jury, which takes the final call. Incidentally, we had more than 1.5 lakh votes this year. In most of these categories, the choice of the fans and that of our Jury were similar. The Jury comprises former India cricket captain Sunil Gavaskar (Chairperson), former World Champion shooter Anjali Bhagwat, former India hockey captain M M Somaya, five-time World chess champion Viswanathan Anand, nine-time National badminton champion Aparna Popat and former India football captain Bhaichung Bhutia. 

Sportstar has been a leading brand for all sporting news. During the pandemic, your print edition was not available for some time. Has it impacted the circulation? How is the digital version doing and what kind of traffic you have there?

The pandemic forced us to take some extraordinary decisions. The nationwide lockdown enforced for our safety made it near impossible for us to ensure the delivery of our readers’ favourite magazine to their doorstep. We were, however, committed to restarting the print magazine at the earliest. Until then, we offered free downloadable versions of the magazine.

To help readers through the difficult times, we also opened our archives and carried two long-form interviews from the past on our website – https://sportstar.thehindu.com/ each day. Readers were asked to reach out to us on social media or email and tell us about their favourite interviews and articles from past issues and we republished them online. All of this and more only resulted in continued patronage from our readers and our numbers have steadily grown. During the IPL, we were clocking more than 10 million users and the numbers have been positive since then.  

World over, many sports magazines have gone online. What are your plans for the future for Sportstar?

We are very proud that our print edition is more than 40 years old. We will continue to nurture print magazine as it gives us a legitimacy as one of the leading voices in the Indian sporting environment. Our aim is to play an important role in shaping the sporting destiny of the country. 

It is an all-new experience: Suresh Balakrishna 

Being a virtual event this year, how do you plan to engage your audience and get a large number of audiences to log in for the awards ceremony? How are you promoting the event?

After we finalised along with the jury that this year was going to be a decade special commemoration, we wanted to choose a unique tagline for this milestone edition. And that is when we decided to go with ‘Giants of the Decade’.

Promotions have been going on for over three months now. We began with extensive campaigning for voting through our own publications of Sportstar, The Hindu and BusinessLine – print, e-Paper, digital and social media, radio, and partnerships with other media houses as well.

This will be a virtual event that is being hosting for the first time on a 360^o virtual space, both for us and our audience. We are ensuring our followership is as excited as we are. With the curtain raiser having received good traction, we are looking forward to greater success for our next 4 episodes from 1-4 April. 

One will miss the true entertainment and thrill of having this event offline. On a virtual platform, how do you plan to make it lively and interesting to get more eyeballs and audiences?

In the past years, what we did was to live stream the awards ceremony for the audience to watch. It was an invite-only event and access to viewers was limited. This year, we are hosting the events on an experiential virtual platform. It is an all-new experience and we have been creating a constant buzz about this across platforms. As much as we miss the on-ground experience, this virtual avatar excites us, and I am sure our viewers will be too. 

To register, visit http://bit.ly/SSAATHG