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You don't prep for 2028 but for 2040, or even 2044.
Sustained sporting excellence is based on mass support, grassroots development, and funding -- and it is this trifecta India needs to work on, systematically, asserts Prem Panicker
Neeraj Chopra has accumulated a global fan club for his one-and-done style, most dramatically showcased at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics when he turned his back on the javelin while it was still in full flight and raised both arms in certitude and celebration.
Through his career, Chopra's best throws have come in the early rounds but in Paris, his first, third, fourth, fifth and sixth throws were all fouls.
His only clean throw, the second, was an 89.45m effort -- good enough for silver, but not good enough to beat the Olympic record-setting 92.97m throw of Pakistan star Arshad Nadeem.
Chopra is that most elite of athletes -- one who can accept success without vainglory and failure without excuses, and so we must needs make his excuses for him.
In javelin throwing, upper body strength comes into play at the instant of the throw, but it is the legs that do all the work in the lead up to that explosive climax.
In Paris, Chopra was handicapped by an adductor muscle injury for which he was recommended, but has not yet undergone, remedial surgery.
Wrestler Vinesh Phogat stormed into the final on day one of the 50kg category wrestling event winning three bouts, including the opening bout against the previously undefeated Yui Susaki.
On day two, she was due to compete for gold in the 50kg category against an opponent she had beaten twice before.
At the mandatory weigh-in, however, she was found to be 100gm overweight, and was disqualified.
100 grams -- about one third the weight of an adult human's heart -- was enough to break the wrestler's, and by extension all of India's, heart.
Amit Rohidas, the pivot of the Indian hockey team's defence and the regular first-rusher, was controversially red-carded in the quarterfinal against Great Britain and had to sit out the crucial semis against Germany -- a crushing blow for a team that, in Paris, had under Coach Craig Fulton showcased a defend-to-win style of play.
If you ask Siri to sum up India's campaign at the 2024 Paris Olympics, it will point to Finagle's corollary to Murphy's Law: 'Anything that can go wrong, will -- at the worst possible moment.'
In Paris, 62 countries won at least one gold. India, placed 71 out of 82 countries in the medals table, was not one of them. (War-ravaged Ukraine won three.)
The cup-half-full optimist can take heart in the fact that India logged six fourth place finishes to go with its one silver and five.
Two potential golds were also lost due to disqualifications. Those stats suggest that India is progressing, not regressing, in international sport.
Bottomline though is, India slipped from 48th rank in Tokyo 2020 to 71st at Paris. So, how does India prepare to do better at Los Angeles 2028?
The short answer is you don't.
Success is not a four-year plan
Success in elite sport does not work to four-year plans. True, you can support the Lakshya Sens, the Manu Bhakers, Swapnil Kusales, Aman Sehrawats and other talents, provide them with facilities and resources, and hope that some of them will do even better next time round.
Remember, though, that their potential opponents will also be training, and several of them come from nations that have far better infrastructure, resources, and administrations.
Two examples suffice to show what it takes. This is Ryan Crouser of the United States, who in Paris won his third gold in the men's shot put event, and is already back home and in training (external link).
Or take China. In Tokyo, China had dropped one possible gold medal in table tennis.
In Paris, Chinese paddlers swept the board, winning every individual and team gold on offer in both men's and women's categories.
Since Beijing 2008, China has won 21 of the 22 table tennis golds on offer across five Olympics.
Now watch these clips -- of a table tennis coaching center in China; of a three year old, a five year old, a six year old (all external links) practicing, to know what it takes to achieve that kind of sporting dominance.
Somewhere on YouTube there is a clip of very young Chinese kids whacking away at tennis balls in a coaching facility -- note that in Paris, Zing Qinwen won China its first ever individual tennis gold in the women's singles.
So no, you don't prep for 2028 but for 2040, or even 2044. Sustained sporting excellence is based on mass support, grassroots development, and funding -- and it is this trifecta India needs to work on, systematically, if we are not to have quadrennial conversations on the lines of 'Why can't a nation of 140 crore people...'
This one is on all of us
To take these points in order, start with public support.
We are episodic sports lovers, the antithesis of what they call a 'sporting culture' where sustained public interest leads to more young people playing sport, which in turn leads to more talent bubbling up and more funding coming in, which in turn leads to the nation climbing up the ladder of success.
Sustained public interest depends largely on the mass media. The media covers, and we consume, events.
The media creates, and we idolise, 'stars' -- and this combination of hype and idolatry leads us to believe our athletes are more capable of going citius, altius, fortius than any other in the world. And then reality bites.
Thus, we are doomed to live out this perennial cycle of hope and despair; we oscillate between 'jeetega bhai jeetega' jingoism and 'Why are we wasting money on these worthless athletes?' blame games.
Hand on heart, had you heard of Manu Bhaker before 28 July when she won bronze in the women's 10m air pistol event?
Because media coverage is episodic, we remain largely oblivious to everything that happens in the interim.
Remember the Rani Rampal-led women's hockey team, those 'grand furies' (external link) whose heroics lit up Tokyo 2020 and, even though it finished fourth, drew admiration from even their victorious rivals and hope in all of us that the team was on the cusp of greatness?
Since then, the team's standards fell away for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that we neither noticed, nor cared, nor questioned.
The media, with marginal exceptions, remains Nelson-eyed to all but cricket. It wakes up a fortnight before a World Championship or an edition of the Olympics to feed us a sponsored diet of inflated expectation.
As a result, we see success as our birthright; each event is greeted with gleeful anticipation and each failure with vicious condemnation.
This week we will be inundated with post-mortems and then we -- the media and us, the public -- are done with sport till the next World Championships or the next Olympics, when it is jeetega bhai time all over again.
Bottom up, not top down
In Chapter 19 of his excellent book Boundary Lab, eminent sports lawyer and founder of the GoSports Foundation Nandan Kamath gives the example of the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium in New Delhi.
Originally built in 1982 to host the Asiad, it was refurbished in 2010, ahead of the Commonwealth Games. The Teflon-coated roof alone cost Rs 308 crore.
'Just over a decade later,' writes Kamath, 'any mention of the stadium evokes a sinking feeling. Literally. Despite its world-class credentials, it hasn't hosted a track and field event in several years. The reason? A mismanaged track re-laying project that led to the entire track caving in, leaving it totally unusable.'
In October 2023, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India presented a performance report on the functioning of the Sports Authority of India -- and its contents evoke that same sinking feeling.
The Major Dhyan Chand national stadium was built in 1933 as a gift from the Maharaja of Bhavnagar.
It was renovated in 2010 at an estimated cost of Rs 262 crore to host the 2010 men's hockey World Cup and the hockey event of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
The SAI Web site goes into panegyrics (external link) about the stadium. What it fails to mention -- and what the CAG report points to -- is that the facility has been rented out to the ministry of home affairs and the Clean Ganga Mission.
In other words, one government ministry spends money to develop sports infrastructure, and SAI makes money renting it out to other government departments.
The Indira Gandhi stadium in New Delhi also comes under SAI (external link). Here, infrastructure created for tennis, wushu and cue sports remain unused and unmaintained.
It has facilities for table tennis, and for boxing -- but no coaches since 2021. It has a tennis court, which is currently used as a dumping ground.
There are several more examples, all of which coalesce into a singular point: A country desperately short of sports infrastructure criminally manages the few world-class stadiums it has built at public expense.
Absent proper infrastructure, where do budding athletes go to train?
In the wake of India's star shuttlers crashing out in their respective events, badminton legend Prakash Padukone was unusually outspoken.
The government has provided our Olympic contingent everything it needs, he said -- monetary support, world class coaches, the opportunity to train abroad.
It is time, he said, for our athletes to take responsibility for the results.
Fair point -- insofar as it addresses India's performance in Paris. But sustained sporting success is built on grassroots development.
Nandan Kamath speaks, and writes, about the sports pyramid. Its base, he says, is hundreds of thousands of young men and women playing the sport of their choice for the sheer love of playing.
From this mass base, talent bubbles up and climbs the ladder. The successive rungs are representative sport at the school, collegiate and university levels; then the district and state levels and onto the national stage, where the best of the best are earmarked for focused attention.
That ladder, Kamath told me during a recent Zoom call, is broken. If you don't have quality infrastructure -- playing fields, proper coaching, adequate funding and other prerequisites -- at the lowest level of the pyramid, the very first link in the chain of success fails.
What we have instead is a hit or miss system where a talented youngster trains on his own, in whatever make-shift facility she can find and with what support her family can afford.
If her luck holds, she makes it to the top; if it doesn't, she doesn't. (In context, listen to Aman Sherawat's aunt (external link) on what the bronze medal-winning wrestler went through,)
Football legend Sunil Chetri made the the point with characteristic passion when in a recent interview he used the Neeraj Chopra example and asked how many Neerajs we have in our country that we don't know about. 'As a country,' he said (external link), 'we don't tap into talent at the right time -- and it matters.'
Contrast this with the efflorescence of cricketing talent in the country. A major factor is the IPL and franchise cricket.
An example: Remember how in 2013 former India coach John Wright found a young Jasprit Bumrah playing a domestic T20 game, recognised his talent and brought him into the Mumbai Indians ecosystem, and how MI funded his training and all else for three years to get him ready for the big time?
It's the money, honey
Coupled with lack of infrastructure and grassroots developmental efforts is the question of funding.
Aman Sehrawat, Manu Bhaker, Sarabjot Singh and Neeraj Chopra are all from Haryana.
13 members of the bronze-winning Indian hockey team come from either Punjab, which sent 19 athletes to Paris, or Haryana, which sent 24.
Clearly, these two states are proven incubators of sporting talent.
The government-run Khelo India program allocated Rs 78 crore to Punjab and Rs 66 crore to Haryana.
On the other hand, Uttar Pradesh, which sent six athletes to Paris, got Rs 438 crore and Gujarat, which sent two athletes, got Rs 426 crore.
The sports ministry also has an infrastructure development fund, of which the allocation for Punjab is Rs 94 crore and Haryana's quota is Rs 89 crore. Against this, UP gets Rs 503 crore and Gujarat gets Rs 508 crore.
If you go to the Indiastat site(external link) and search for 'sports scheme', you'll get comprehensive breakdowns of the various GoI schemes and the fund allocations -- and the takeaway is that such unequal fund allocation is not a one-shot, but a recurring annual feature.
If your sports budget is frittered away for political advantage, the already weak base of the pyramid collapses entirely -- because, note, these funds/schemes are not intended to support the elite athletes but to build grassroots infrastructure and to get millions across the country onto our playing fields -- literally the mission statement of Khelo India(external link).
The rot starts at the top
To solve a problem, you have to identify -- and acknowledge -- the problem.
Nandan Kamath in his book Boundary Lab points out that as per our Constitution, sport is a state subject -- but it is the Centre, through the National Sports Federations (NSFs), that exercises most of the important rights, beginning with 'establishing, regulating and monitoring India's institutional sports structures'.
If the top of the organisational pyramid is broken, it ramifies all the way downwards -- and the top is visibly broken.
The list of NSFs that have been banned at some time or other by the respective global governing bodies includes the Indian Boxing Federation, the Archery Association of India, the All India Football Federation, the Table Tennis Federation of India, and the Wrestling Federation of India, which has the dubious distinction of having been suspended by the Indian government -- and that is just a shortlist.
The WFI is a teachable example. As I pointed out in this post (external link), the Indian wrestling ecosystem has had no proper management for most of the past 18 months.
On date, the WFI is not recognised by the Indian sports ministry, which told the court as recently as April that 'it would neither recognise nor provide any support to WFI's activities'.
In other words, wrestling in an Olympic year was managed ad hoc. Any wonder that with our wealth of world class talent, we managed only to earn a solitary bronze across all wrestling events in Paris -- and that by an athlete who came up despite the system, not because of it?
Marching towards Amrit Kaal
In Boundary Lab, Nandan Kamath goes into detail about how to build a robust sports infrastructure; the book is essential reading for all those who work in sports policy.
We have examples to learn from right here. For instance, there is Haryana, which brings together the sports trifecta: Mass support for wrestling, widespread infrastructure, and coaching available for those who want to enter the sport, plus a clear pathway to the top of the pyramid.
Or take Odisha. Indian hockey was at its nadir when in 2018 the state government stepped in to sponsor the team.
In 2022, the government renewed the sponsorship to run till 2033 and, earlier this year, extended the deadline to 2036.
It was not just about the money. The state on its own dime renovated the Kalinga stadium in Bhubaneshwar, and built the Birsa Munda hockey stadium, inaugurated in January 2023 ahead of the hockey World Cup, and now recognised (external link) as the world's largest fully-seated hockey arena.
Alongside this, it has supported numerous coaching centres across the state that has helped in discovering and developing fresh talent -- ace defender Rohidas, for instance, was picked up from a village in the tribal belt of Sundergarh district.
India last won a medal in men's hockey, a gold, in the boycott-hit 1980 Moscow Olympics.
It has since gone through four fallow decades. Odisha's involvement began in 2018 -- and in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the team won a bronze, its first medal in forty years, followed by another bronze in Paris this year.
Though chess is not an Olympic sport, Chennai's role is worth mentioning.
Manual Aaron, India's first ever international master, set up the Tal Chess Club in 1972, and it was here that Viswanathan Anand first learned to play the game.
The state played its part -- thus, the late J Jayalalithaa introduced compulsory chess training in all government schools, and incumbent Chief Minister M K Stalin more recently allocated Rs one crore to promote chess in schools.
Today, four of the top 20 Grandmasters are from India -- second only to the United States which has five.
Haryana, Odisha, Chennai -- all examples of what happens when the focus is firmly on grassroots development.
I could stop right there -- but bullet-pointed below are a few thoughts, arranged in order of priority:
What is it they say in management school? First plan the work, then work the plan? That.
If we as a nation do all of this and more, India's sporting Amrit Kaal might come as early as 2036, or 2040. Or we can go back to business as usual, and I'll see you in four years with an updated version of this column.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff.com
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com