Why does a country as big and able as India fail to produce top class athletes?

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Sudha Singh (right) wins gold in 3000m steeplechase at 2010 Asian Games in China

India is a sports crazy nation. It has the world’s second-largest population and is the 10th largest economy; it’s the biggest democracy in existence and one of the oldest nations in history. But why is India unable to win medals at the Olympics? The answer to this lies so deep that a gold miner will reach the earth’s crust when he starts digging for gold, and even then he might not find it. Though this analogy is a hyperbole, it pretty much sums up the state of athletes in India.

Though the population of India and China differs by a few tens of millions, India’s contribution to the Olympics is negligible. Much to it’s shame, even the United States with almost a fourth of India’s population has always held it’s flags high at the Games. This problem makes one wonder what exactly is wrong with the current state of affairs in India, and it is one that needs to be addressed soon.

In terms of the disparity between population size and medals won, there is no worse Olympic performer than India. It seems bizarre that a country of more than 1.2 billion people can only collect an average of less than one medal per Games.

Albeit without a gold medal, London 2012 was India’s most successful Olympics to date, where it finished with two silver and four bronze medals. That is over 200 million people per medal, the highest ratio of all competing nations at London. Compare that to China, with one medal for every 15.5 million people (for a total of 87 medals) or the U.S. with one medal for every three million Americans.

With an annual GDP of $1.842 trillion, India is the world’s tenth largest economy, according to 2012 World Bank data. Yet, it’s number of medals is far lower than that of countries with economies of comparable size. Take Russia; although its GDP is marginally larger than India’s, it won 82 medals at the London Games.

One had to scroll way down before getting to India in the Olympic rankings. It was 55th out of 79, below the likes of North Korea (20), the tiny Caribbean archipelago of Trinidad and Tobago (47) and nowhere near fellow BRIC economies. If the medal tally is adjusted to its population and the size of its economy, the result is even less remarkable; India comes last in both tables.

It would be false to say that India does not produce good sportsmen and women. In cricket, the country’s ardent obsession, it had in Sachin Tendulkar, one of the sport’s greatest ever players, until he retired from all formats at the end of last year. The Indian cricket team under it’s captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni has reached new heights winning the ICC World Cup and the Champions Trophy ever since it first won the inaugural T20 World Cup in South Africa in 2007. Saina Nehwal’s successes worldwide has made her India’s ambassador in badminton of late. The Indian men’s field hockey team won six consecutive Olympic Golds from 1928 to 1956 (field hockey accounts for more than half of India’s historical total of 26 Olympic medals).

There is no doubt that India has abundant talent in it’s repository; but why does it underperform at the Olympic Games?

The biggest problem is that Indian athletes don’t enjoy much financial or institutional support. Although this is improving, thanks to growing public investment and non-profit initiatives like the Olympic Gold Quest and the Mittal Champions Trust, this is in no way comparable to the kind of backing athletes enjoy in top-ranked Olympic countries.

“The correlation between the amount of money invested in athletes and the number of medals is very strong,” argues Geet Sethi, a nine-time world billiards champion as well as head and founder of the Olympic Gold Quest, an organization that scouts and trains athletes for the Games.

“For instance, in 1998 our sports budget was 1.5 billion rupees ($27 million) while China’s was 15 billion rupees. China won 10 times the number of medals India won at the 1998 Asian Games,” he said.

Olympic shooter Abhinav Bindra, who won gold in Beijing, agrees the room for improvement is plenty: “I think in sport in India a lot needs to still be done. I do believe that we have an abundance of talent but that talent needs to be nurtured right from a young age and we need to have world-class infrastructure, world-class coaching and training right from a young age.”

In an interview with India Real Time, he described China as a good example of how investing in sports translates into Olympic victories. “Their rise has been phenomenal,” he says.

Besides, India does not have the Communist history that Russia and China shared. Some argue that, over the years, this has translated into a sporting culture that is conducive to Olympic victory by making it easier to channel resources to athletes.

One of the other big problems of India paying less attention to the Olympic sports is its over-obsession with cricket. No doubt India has made itself prominent in the world with continual successes in cricket, it has kind of acted as a hindrance to the progress of other sports. More and more money is flowing into cricket with a number of sponsors lined up to provide support while other sports don’t get the financial injection they so badly require.

Most parents, if their children do take up sport as a profession, want them to become cricketers for obvious reason that there’s money and fame involved. Also, after the advent of the lucrative Indian Premier League around seven years ago, this mentality has become ever more deep-rooted in the psyche of the Indian public.

The thought of the inability of Indian athletes to gather medals at the Olympics occurs only once in four years, that too for a month or so when the media are covering it. The rest of the time, people are busy worshipping and enjoying the entertainment that cricket provides.

The participation of India in the Sochi Winter Olympics this year in Russia was a fiasco of massive proportions. The dream of every athlete of holding his country’s flag high at the Games hit rock bottom when the Indian athletes – a luger, a cross country skier, and an alpine skier – competed under a stock Olympic flag after the nation was suspended from the Sochi games.

India actually had been banned from Olympic activity since December 2012, when it’s Olympic association was banned by the International Olympic Committee. The IOC had claimed that the Indian Olympic Association primarily comprised politicians which was against the rules – such an ignominy for a country with so many ambitions.

Indian athletesluger Shiva Keshavan, Alpine skier Himanshu Thakur and cross-country skier Nadeem Iqbal, labelled as Independent Olympic participants (Shiva Kesavan - third from left) march under IOC flag during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia

Indian athletes (left to right: luger Shiva Keshavan, cross-country skier Nadeem Iqbal, and Alpine skier Himanshu Thakur), labelled as Independent Olympic participants march under IOC flag during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia

The Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games are hardly covered by the Indian media unless it’s the host nation where it is supposed to have more chances of grabbing medals.

There’s no unanimity, no obvious explanation, no single unified theory of Indian Olympic under-performance. Though there are certainly some factors specific to India that might explain this trend, those might say as much about the better-performing countries and their ability to exploit certain advantages that India lacks.

The Indian GDP per capita is well into the bottom quartile of all countries, ranked among landlocked African nations and still recovering former war zones. Indians are poor as well as weakened by poor infrastructure and poor governance, which touches everything from public health to education to opportunities for advancement. Derek Thompson explained why rich countries tend to perform so well in the Olympics, boosted by better access to athletics infrastructure such as swimming pools and tennis courts, by “talent magnetism,” and other factors.

Its not just the facilities provided that matter, but also the standard of living in a country. Suppose a person in the United States decides to try his skills at athletics and wants to give a shot at winning medals in the Games in the near future, he can do that; and if he fails to get anything out of this profession, he can resort to something else outside of sports and still manage to live a good life. But if the same person attempts to do this in India, he will never recover from his decision that may turn out to be a mistake, and will forever have to struggle throughout his life, because he has neither the educational qualification nor the skills to equip himself/herself for a life outside sport.

Though the population of India is more than 1.2 billion, the portion of the population participating in athletics is very low. This is mainly because of poor childhood health, physical isolation by poor transportation from the athletics centers in the big cities, or often because they are simply not sufficiently aware of the Olympics or the sports involved. To add to this, the idea of representing a country doesn’t exactly come to mind for someone when they find it really difficult to have two square meals a day.

Other developing countries like India such as Russia and China also have a fair share of poor sections in their population. But the number of well-educated and well-nourished people in such countries is also high. They make up a good portion of the effective participating population.

Yet, the income of a country can’t be the dominant factor in deciding whether it can excel in Olympics or not. Poorer countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa excel in some of the sports. For instance, though unemployment in Spain has reached an all-time high, they are one of the best at hockey and football. Some of the poorest countries like Kenya and Ethiopia are home to some of the best runners. Kazakhstan dominates in weightlifting. Regional differences play a part in this. It seems India has yet to discover an event in the Olympics in which it can excel, since the golden days of hockey are long gone.

What India needs is the government as well as parents to take the initiative. Yes, you read it right. Parents!

A father who wants his children to only study, but not give a shot at sports has got no right to ask, “Why doesn’t India win medals at Olympics?”.

Encouragement should begin right at the grassroots level. Then comes the government. The government should have a proper system for athletics and other sports. Children should be given training right from school level. Some hours per week should be allotted only to athletics. Poor kids should be given proper training to nurture their skills. Monetary rewards should be given to those who gather medals at the Games, which would at least encourage some to take up sports as a profession.

Even in such unfortunate and helpless circumstances, India does have reasons for optimism. London provided it’s best medal total and it sent it’s largest ever delegation of athletes to the Games (83). Everyone hopes that the number of delegates as well as medals increases when it travels to Rio in two years time. Nobody is expecting miracles, but success breeds success; if any Indian heroes do emerge from Rio in 2016, there will be hundreds of millions of youngsters back in India ready to try and emulate them. One can only hope to wait and see if the country can see another Milkha Singh in the near future.

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Edited by Staff Editor