Our contingent — of 117 athletes and 118 support staff — to the Paris 2024 Olympics has admittedly come back with a haul little lower than what we had bagged at Tokyo and drastically below our expectations of ‘at least double digits’. There were moments of joy and glory when Manu Bhaker was awarded two bronzes on successive days and many heartbreaks like the same brilliant girl getting fourth place in another event (actually her favourite) or weightlifter Mira Bai Chanu ending up at the same unfortunate spot or our fancied shuttler Lakshya Sen’s near miss in the singles; also fourth places in mixed team archery, mixed team skeet and men’s 10-metre air rifle. I can’t forget Manu’s response when a reporter asked her, “despite having won two medals, why do you look so crestfallen?” Poor girl, in tears, responded with a forced half smile, “because fourth place is never good”.
Biggest disappointment was of course the exceptionally brave wrestler Vinesh Phogat getting disqualified for being 100 grams over the 50 kg class she was competing in. Then, there was the ecstasy of beating England in men’s hockey and agony when the same wonderful team lost to Germany. Our men later getting their due by winning the bronze against Spain — a precious back-to-back bronze after Tokyo. Also disappointing to see our valiant Neeraj Chopra surrendering the gold to his Pakistani rival Nadeem who threw a literal monster full 3-1/2 metres ahead of our man’s best. Such is life, and, we also know that Neeraj had several injuries – so getting the silver is actually a victory.
Throughout two weeks of the competition, in addition to the excruciating hard work and training of the competitors and help of their support staff, there were also the prayers of 1.4 billion Indians but life and sports competition can be cruel. All of us want our teams to bring home more medals from international events and we actually did well at the Commonwealth and Asian Games (my BW column 13 January). Our ‘desires’ are big and why not — everyone desires infinitely more than what we end up getting but there’s a huge difference between ‘Desires & Ground Realities’ and we must do an honest, objective and dispassionate introspection of our strengths and weaknesses. Time to do that now before we start preparing for the next big event.
Before I come to that, a few words about the unfair, unwanted and cruel criticism of our boys and girls who fail.
We love, adore and hero-worship our Olympians, we celebrate their victories but when one of them fails to make the grade, without giving even a moment’s thought, we switch to cruel criticism that does huge damage; demoralises them and makes them feel guilty. This is most unfair and must be avoided. I have heard people making snide remarks like “six medal aur population 140 crores”; some troll the players on social media, others start finding faults in the system of selections, another set become experts, without knowing anything about the game, and start postmortem of their every action — all this while the games are on — lot of it reaches the competitors. Imagine what it does to their psyche.
Our politicians are of course, in another league. Sticking to their ‘opposition dharma’ they shout “conspiracy” when Phogat gets disqualified! Pray, conspiracy by whom? Are the referees and judges hatching a conspiracy against our players? They demand “thorough investigation into technical reasons behind the disqualification and add that “the truth and real reason must come to the fore”. The gutsy girl went through a lot in her personal life, stuck her neck out while protesting against the WFI chief; she had to juggle weight categories, did everything to stick to the 50 kg limit, fought bravely and reached the final. Someone in her support team messed up and she was legitimately disqualified. Tragic but let this politicisation of the issue not take away from her glorious journey. Her family suspecting ‘conspiracy’ is understandable but for our leaders to raise the issue in parliament – that reaches the organisers and the whole world – is ridiculous and most embarrassing.
Before I move to ‘what needs to be done’ let me also mention here that in the midst of all this gloom and despondency, we mustn’t forget a silver lining. Six medals are definitely sub-par but let’s also recall that after Norman Pritchard (his Indian nationality is still disputed as our rulers claimed that he is British) won two medals in Paris in 1900, it took Dhyan Chand’s boys 28 years to clinch the hockey gold in Amsterdam – and the Indian hockey team kept winning in Los Angeles (1932) Berlin (1936) London (1948) Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956), but it was only in 1952 at Helsinki that wrestler K. D. Jadhav won India’s first individual medal!
After another long drought, it was in 1996 that Leander Peas broke the jinx at Atlanta, by winning a bronze in Tennis – the first Asian in Olympic history to win a tennis medal and the only Indian till date. We moved from three medals in 2008 to six in 2012, two in 2016 and the crowning glory of seven in 2020 at Tokyo; so six in 2024 is not something to be scoffed at. Fourth places are agonisingly painful but also show a flicker of hope that we can improve in 2028. Of course, we have to thoroughly overhaul our systems and approach and work very hard for the same.
What Needs To Be Done
Let me begin with our sports federations and who runs them. I will look at just nine – archery, athletics, badminton, boxing, hockey, shooting, swimming, TT and weightlifting.
(a) Except in the case of athletics no president is a sportsperson! The hockey president is both a sportsman and a politician, which is great. Even second level – Sr. VPs/Honorary Secretaries – except athletics and TT, no sportsperson there. Third rung – VPs – only six out of the 60 odd office bearers are sportspersons. These federations are responsible for preparing and sending our teams to the Olympics! If only we could fill up all federations with acclaimed sportspersons as heads and even three/four lower rungs, give them autonomy, make sure that politicians do not create hindrances in their work, government allocates sufficient funds, training is scientific and meticulous – including adequate foreign exposure – the selection process of the teams is objective and transparent; I can visualise rapid progress very quickly. Hopefully we will also not see any repeats of the WFI kind of scandal.
Let’s now look at our training platforms. A recent Indian Express report came out with the startling findings that the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) of USA, that administers the inter collegiate athletics is the real topper in the Paris medals tally. The NCAA schools sent more than 1000 former and current athletes, who represented 100 different countries at the Paris Olympics. Between the 272 of them they won a mindboggling 330 medals for 26 countries – more than the combined haul of the USA (126), China (91), Japan (45) and Australia (53). Which school, college or university in India can claim anything in this area? Colleges and schools have to be our nurseries for nurturing talent!
Chhatrasal Akhada in North Delhi has proven to be the ‘real nursery of our Olympic winners in wrestling’. Out of our cumulative eight Olympic medals six have come from Chhatrasal – the latest sensation being young Aman Sehrawat. Why don’t we replicate a thousand such akhadas all over the country?
We can’t start with a small base of, say, five or ten thousand athletes at our few academies (SAI-2, Regional Centres –11, Centres of Excellence –14, Training Centres – 56 and Special Area Games –20); grand total 103) and hope to win a large number of medals at any international meet. China, for example, has an estimated 300 million playing table tennis – out of them about 10 million at a competitive level. Reportedly they have one TT table for every seven people. That’s how the Chinese dominate the game. Five gold and a silver to their credit at Paris. In football, I understand, most European and South American countries have 100s of professional clubs in major cities. They also have semi-professional and amateur clubs. That’s how they dominate the game at the Olympics, and more importantly, in FIFA World Cup and Champions League. Similarly, badminton and swimming are practised religiously in China and the USA, Australia and Britain. Same story in South Korea for weightlifting and Iran for wrestling. To succeed in a big way in any discipline, it has to become a culture in the country – like chess has become in India and we have found glory internationally over decades.
Last point that I want to add is the culture of ‘giving back to society’ by top sportspersons and athletes which is, sadly, not as common in our case as one would like to see. Starting with:
P.T. Usha – our original track and field star who was the first Indian woman to reach the final of one event in the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and went on to dominate most Asian events throughout the 1980s – who has done a lot with her work at the National Indian Talent Olympiad in schools across India
Pullela Gopichand, former Indian badminton star who was only the second Indian to win the All England Singles Championship in 2001 (after Prakash Padukone in 1980) and has done yeoman service to the game through his badminton academy and as chief national coach
M.S. Dhoni
Mary Kom
Kapil Dev and
K. Srikanth who have all been running coaching academies; one doesn’t hear of many more. They are all famous, loved by fans, honoured by the government, admired by the companies who engage them for endorsements but I wish many more were actively involved in helping and coaching juniors aspiring to excel in their sport. Most of our sportspersons come from humble backgrounds. If only each successful star was to ‘adopt 100 kids’ and see them through intensive training along with nutritious diet etc., I am sure we would see many more medals at international fora. I apologise for not mentioning others – who may also be doing great work – due to my ignorance.
Surprising Media Apathy
Even though media reporting of the two- week- long Olympics was admirable, curiously an important event at Paris, on 11 August, went virtually unreported! On this day, at a special session of the International Olympics committee, our 2008 shooting gold medalist – the first Indian to win an individual medal (Beijing 2008) Abhinav Bindra was awarded the ‘Olympic Order’ for his exceptional services to the Olympics mission and propagating Olympic Values. Unknown to most of us this media shy quiet gentleman has been involved with a ‘values education’ programme that will benefit 15 million children in Assam and Odisha and also a sustainability project to plant one million trees in Odisha.
We have a long way to go – from six medals at Paris to, hopefully, 15 at Los Angeles and in geometric progression thereafter but we will need to do a lot of cleaning up and hard work.
