It’s called Olympics.
It is not an exaggeration to say that India has got the most shameful record in Olympics compared to every other nation on earth. Looks like we find building an intercontinental ballistic missile and putting a satellite in a geostationary orbit is much easier than developing a medal winning athlete.
To begin with, let’s be fair to India. It has only participated in a few disciplines like hockey till very recently so hence being a multiple medal winner was a far cry. Even today India has one of the smallest contingent (118 plus athletes in Rio 2016, its largest yet) from major nations and participated in only half of the sporting disciplines in Olympics. Contrast that with USA which always has a 500+ strong contingent in all the sporting disciplines. China too has close to 400 and tiny Netherlands too has a contingent of 200+ in any edition of the Olympics.
But then, isn’t it unnerving that countries which are a fraction as big as India are sending a bigger contingent of quality athletes and being more successful? They get a medal for every five to six athletes they send. India traditionally got one per twenty or thirty, if they were lucky. Most shameful part were the three Olympics of 1984, 1988 and 1992 when India’s medal tally was zero.
Some of the clichéd (and incorrect) reasons given for our pathetic track records at Olympics are:-
Cricket has more money and hence no one wants to take up other sports.
Cash rich cricket as we know is a very recent phenomenon, stretching back only to the last three decades, while other big sports have got there millionaires for as long as one can remember. Cricket has sustained itself admirably in India, with BCCI now generating 80% of the total cricket revenue in the world.
But blaming cricket for this debacle is very unfair. In every country or continent, there are just two or three sports which tower above the rest monetarily. None of the American Olympians can earn even a tenth of what a baseball or a basketball player earns during three or four seasons nor can any Olympian in any European country earn even a tenth of what any footballer earns in two or three seasons. But there is no dearth of young sportspersons there, both quality and quantity who want to be athletes. In poorer African nations of Kenya and Ethiopia or for those in the Caribbean, the stakes are even more against people taking up any kind of sport which doesn’t pay as well as basketball or baseball. If we go by this logic then the Caribbean young guns should all be going to America to join the Major League .But they don’t. Tiny Jamaica is an equal competitor to mighty America in sprinting.
There is dearth of facilities and funds
The problem is not the dearth of funds but their use. More money is generated from an ODI cricket series than what is allocated for Olympics and coaches for athletes. The seventh largest economy in the world has got its priority wrong in all fields, from public amenities to national security and hence the shameful condition of even public sanitation not available in most of the places. How can sports escape any apathy then? We are more interested in doing Commonwealth Games scams than building a good sporting culture.
Does this argument claim that the likes of Kenya, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Iran, Azerbaijan etc. are wealthy and have unlimited funds to train their medal winners? What excuse can we give when Olympic medal winners emerge in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad &Tobago which have lesser populations that any locality of any Indian metro?
Sportsmen, except in sports like Tennis or Golf or swimming come mostly from working class or poor background. They face the same difficulty in their lives that their counterparts face here, sometimes much more if we take the African or Central Asian republics into consideration. No amount of medals or accolades is going to cause a sporting revolution in the Indian middle class or in Indian metros. The next batch of athletes will come from the backwaters and not the suburbs. It’s not glittering Gurgaon but the non-descript town of Bhiwani in the same state that has seen the rise of Olympic boxers in India.
South Africa, a country rife in violent crimes with a population less than Gujarat produces excellent sportspersons in every field, cricket included. This, even after being banned for thirty years due to apartheid. China had no medals before Los Angeles 1984. They had not participated in the preceding eight editions. Since then, slowly but steadily they have replaced erstwhile Soviet Union in the medals tally. The Chinese sporting model has taken the world by strong and cruel as it may be, it is giving results and a better life for the young people that it is training. The Chinese are already masters in badminton, gymnastics, weightlifting, table tennis and diving. They have now excellent swimmers second to none. The only field that they are left wanting is in athletics but knowing what they are; one is assured that they will bridge this gap pretty soon. The point here is that China had non-existent sporting culture and facilities to speak of four decades ago and today they have left that period of history far behind.
Talent is not being tapped
This argument assumes that there is no effort being made to find new talent and that even a TV viewing layman is more intelligent than a coach in this regard.
However third rate the sports scenario in India may be, one has to understand that the coaches are no fools. They painstakingly detect sporting talent going to places which us urban animals don’t even know exist. Yet the results have been far from satisfactory. It’s not just enough to ponder that how a country of billion and a quarter can’t get even a dozen medals. Just population isn’t important. Quantity has to be converted into quality. China has managed that. We haven’t.
Every state in India has a wrestling tradition. Every village in India has at least ten “pehelwaans” and India has close to six hundred thousand villages. So there are potentially about sixty million wrestlers to choose from in India. Yet, there is a difference of sixty years between the success of Khashaba Jadhav and Sushil Kumar. If you cannot be a world leader in a sport where the talent pool available exceeds the population of most of the countries on earth, then something is seriously wrong.
Poor Infrastructure
India indeed has a poor and a non-existent infrastructure in sports. But then, infrastructure is not so very impressive in most of the nations other than USA, Russia, China or the European nations. Most of the medal winners from these countries have had only the most basic facilities. But that doesn’t stop them from getting their well-deserved glory. Why can’t our people do that knowing that succeeding will bring them riches beyond their dreams and will bring golden days for their sport in India?
There are enough economic incentives now for any medal winner in Olympics (even national level players have jobs in sports quota in railways and other PSUs) so the arguments of poor monetary rewards does not stand any ground. Things are much brighter than the dark old socialist days. Even in the mighty USA are the parents of any young athlete driven to the very end of resources going for the training of their wards. It has more to do with poor quality, our best not being there with the world’s best. As it was said by a former tennis player from India on India’s dismal performance in Olympics in 2012 “If being on the biggest stage does not spur you to go for the maximum, then probably you shouldn’t be here”.
It’s high time now that we stop harping about India’s eight Olympic gold medals in hockey after each dismal performance by the hockey team. Hockey in India began its demise when the country failed to adapt to the fast play due to the AstroTurf surface which was introduced in the mid-1970s. The last gold medal in Moscow 1980 holds not a very special value as the entire NATO block had boycotted it, making it a truncated competition. It only prolonged the demise. If after four decades, we still are struggling to cope with the changes, then it is no one else’s fault but ours. Indian hockey is the perfect example of what state’s corrupt system can do to a beautiful thing.
It was the last event of Rome 1960 Olympics, the marathon; Abebe Bikila did not find any shoes that fit him perfectly from the event’s sponsor Adidas. Two hours before the event, he decided to run barefoot, just like he had trained. He won the marathon in record time, becoming the first ever gold medal winner from a sub Saharan nation. He won the marathon four years later, in Tokyo 1964 as well. When asked why he decided to run barefoot, he replied “I wanted the world to know that my country Ethiopia has always won with determination and heroism”. Sports they say, reveals character more than building it. What could be a more apt example than this? This win laid the foundation of athletics in Ethiopia which today makes country the king of long and middle distance running, only Kenya being the other equal. On the other side, Khashaba Jadhav’s bronze in Helsinki 1952 couldn’t bring golden days for wrestling nor did PT Usha missing and Milkha Singh missing the bronze narrowly in Olympics bring any bright future for athletics in India. And they had trained in facilities which would make today’s look like five stars in comparison.
The writer is no way is undermining India’s medal winners, may it be in Olympics or any other tournament. Each and every one of them is a hero who has dared to rise above the third rate lethargic system that surrounds them knowing all the risks involved. They must be cheered and cherished. We can always hope that however limited our successes are, they will ignite some spark among the kids who have the potential.
It isn’t about having a state run inefficient infrastructure for everything other than cricket. State run infrastructure gave brilliant results in the erstwhile Soviet Union and the Communist bloc and is giving great results in China. Private run sponsorships are giving similarly great results in USA and entire Europe now. Even a merger between the two in India will not give the desired results.
It is about having abysmally low benchmarks. We gloat over our achievements in Commonwealth games and Asian games, forgetting that the other strong contending nations like China or South Korea don’t even send their best in such tournaments.
It is about the nonsense of “participation is more important than winning” and “padhoge likhoge to hoge nawab, kheloge koodoge to hoge kharab” (If you study, you will be a king, if you spend time in playing you will be a waste). There is no importance given to physical development in India. In most schools, there are just 45 minutes allotted out of 8 1/2 hours of school time for games and sports. Fifteen minutes are spent in searching the sports teacher’s cabinet as to what is available to play and so it’s just half an hour remains to make the most of it. Many a times, this “wasteful period” is substituted with extra classes as exams are so very important.
Let’s face it, we are a sporting midget except cricket is concerned. And we don’t care watching any other sport except cricket. The percentage of people in India who know about sports track and field events, swimming, gymnastics etc. and watch them can be counted in decimals. Except cricket statistics, people do not want to know anything about sports. And we dont want to change it. There are no more than three to four sponsors for an Olympics telecast in India, whose ads play again and again. Tedious as it is see, it reflects the apathy very conspicuously.
Other nations give full support to their retiring athletes by giving them an option of resuming their education and having a shot at a very decent life after their playing days are over. But not us and hence we see the ugly scenes of former athletes living a life of penury or in extreme cases, Paan Singh Tomar, the national champion in steeplechase who became a dacoit.
It is amazing then, how we expect India to win medals in Olympics while doing absolutely nothing to make that happen, by neither building the training facilities nor athletes and most important by neither building an environment to nurture sport.
It is like expecting a child from one’s wife without doing the needful. People who define India beating Pakistan in cricket as the pinnacle of sporting achievement cry about medals in Olympics.
The fastest runner, the longest and the highest jumper, the farthest discus and javelin thrower, the strongest weightlifter and wrestler have zero value in the eyes of the great children of Bharat Maata. What excites them most is third rate Bollywood fare, a good marklist, a substandard T20 cricket tournament and medical and engineering seats in dubious institutes. As long as this remains unchanged, India will continue to languish in sixtieth or seventieth place in the medal tally, if lucky.
I write this as the Rio 2016 games close, with India putting up its worst performance, with respect to the size of its contingent. In four years’ time, I wish that that what I’m writing now be proved redundant , but I sadly know that we are notorious for relapsing to our old ways.
