She comes back with no medals but is a winner of hearts! The modern-day Olympics hark back more than 100 years or so. It is about emotions overriding seemingly unsurmountable hurdles and nations establishing soft power. It’s an indomitable quest for Gold, nothing less, and in modern times, we have witnessed photo-finish situations where only technology could determine the eventual winner. While it’s about friendship, it’s also about hegemony—the US continues to dominate.
It’s merciless as well. India sent a contingent of 117 athletes, equal support staff, and 22 officials. We won 6 medals (1 silver and five bronze), and six athletes placed fourth. India participated in sixteen out of forty-five disciplines, and we were ranked 71st as a nation.
The report card may not be impressive, but behind those 117 athletes, a billion Indians were glued to screens, cheering them all the way. What will happen to the other 100-odd athletes who didn’t make it? Will they be cast aside and trod over? Possibly, yes. Once the puja is over, what happens to the idols that were created to perfection?
We are a very large nation, so there’s no dearth of talent, even though pursuing sports isn’t a natural career choice for most young people. However, given our population, it’s a mystery why we aren’t there yet. The reasons aren’t unknown either and have been dissected time and again – administrative bias, inadequate infrastructure, late spotting of talent, impoverished athletes, gender discrimination, and genetics are on the laundry list. Every time we miss by a whisker, innovative theories do rounds till they get buried or become memes in social media.
Granted, in some disciplines, such as the 100 m sprint, the genetically endowed will be unbeatable, but there are 45 disciplines (at least in Paris), and not all require a display of brute power. Surely, in sporting disciplines where skill and physical conditioning are at par, the balance can tilt in our favour. Manu Bhaker proved it in shooting by winning two bronze medals and was the first Indian athlete to do so. Wrestling is as much about power as it’s about technique. Vinesh Phogat proved that the genetics theory is mostly bunkum.
So, as an armchair enthusiast, I am forwarding yet another theory, i.e., accountability of the support staff. After the Vinesh Phogat debacle, I believe the support staff isn’t as obsessively driven as the athletes. Sure, they do a good job but aren’t obsessive about winning, and that’s why it happened. We talk about overcoming struggles all the time. Someone’s poor, yet they win a gold medal (Arshad Nadeem in javelin throw). Or, for that matter, in a team game, there are all kinds of challenges, from sponsorship to selection to training facilities, etc. (hockey being a case in point).
I have been watching the Olympics from a young age, but only now have I realised a new challenge only certain athletes face: maintaining their weight. All of us have earned a much-desired PhD on how Vinesh Phogat’s weight shot up by 2.7 kilos, and they could bring it down by 2.6 and stretch the human limits of endurance. Imagine for a moment that she was allowed to compete. She would have fought in a dehydrated and starved condition. I think every other struggle pales in comparison.
And this isn’t an outlier. If you read about Phogat’s ordeal, you will realise this is common practice. It may not be as high as 2.7 kilos, but shedding 1 – 1.5 kilos in a few hours is common. Mary Kom did it once – she shed 2 kilos by skipping for 2 hours. Athletes in these selected sporting disciplines often compete in a physical condition where it’s almost impossible to remain vertical, let alone fight! And yet they do and win glory for the country.
Indian athletes are no less talented and obsessed about winning medals, but it’s been 70 or 80 years, and the needle hasn’t moved appreciably.
Chidanand Rajghatta, ToI’s Foreign Correspondent and a renowned columnist, has made an interesting observation. He says it’s due to the size of our nation, which creates a pressure cooker-like situation. The spotlight is always on athletes, and expectations of a billion-plus Indians often get to them. Rajghatta adds that if Indian athletes were to represent Papua New Guinea or any other small nation where people do their daily chores without being meddlesome and creating a ruckus, the winning percentage would have been much higher.
Perhaps it’s time we asked ourselves – are we contended with romanticism, often linked to sporting endeavours, or do we move higher to be more scientific in our approach? Folklores will draw the crowd, bring in sponsors & meme-makers, and bronze medals will jingle in the basket. But for Gold to shine through and create a more mellifluous sound, we require a zero-tolerance attitude towards slip-ups – both athletic prowess and administrative capabilities.
We’ve done reasonably well in the former, and now it’s time to catch the bull by the horns in the case of the latter. “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip”, as the wise man once said.