There are sporting events with security teams, and then there are sporting events with a man whose professional qualification is sounding convincingly like a langur.
The Badminton World Championships open in New Delhi tomorrow, and organizers have hired a small team of professional monkey mimics to help keep rhesus macaques away from the stadium.
The method is admirably low-tech. Rhesus monkeys are wary of larger langurs, so the specialists imitate langur calls to persuade them that the neighborhood has become professionally inconvenient. The precaution follows January’s India Open, when a monkey wandered into the stands; organizers have also taken measures against the city’s famously determined pigeons.
One of the mimics, Zafar, is a third-generation practitioner.
Every great tournament eventually discovers the importance of specialist staffing.
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