Independence Day 2023 | How India can win 20 Olympic medals at the 2048 Olympics, in 5 steps

Perhaps an alternative to politics in sports administrations would be to invite corporates to adopt a sport and run its sports federation for a decade in a business-like manner. (Photo via Pixabay/Pexels)

Why India wins so few Olympic medals is perhaps the most debated non-cricket sporting question in the country. It’s a phenomenon that baffles everyone, inspires fits of academic research, and chronic soul-searching. How can a country of India’s size, population and diversity be so ineffective at the world’s premier multisport event? Even Chinese Taipei or Belarus or Qatar or Israel do better.

Every Olympic year, the same themes run on repeat: there is no sporting culture in India outside of cricket, there is too little funding, the system is not geared to provide athletes what they need, corruption is rampant, etc., etc.

There is, no doubt, truth in all the above reasons. But, even taking all these things into account, it is difficult to explain just why so many other countries—many of them with similar if not worse problems than India, and all except China with a population pool just a fraction of India’s—do better at the Olympics.

That is, until you add two more factors to the equation: the quality of grassroots coaching in India, and the political administration of all its sports federations. These are the two most entrenched and all-pervasive factors that keep India from being more successful on the global sporting stage. They are also nearly impossible to change.

Here are five key points that can help India’s vast sporting talent pool flourish, in decreasing levels of improbability when it comes to implementation.

1. Take the politicians out of the picture

This is not to say that there haven’t been effective or even good political administrators in Indian sports, and ineffective and poor administrators who came from the sporting instead of political milieu. But politics tends to breed corruption, nepotism, power struggles and the compulsion to hold on to power no matter what. As a result, it is only the very rare sport that escapes the apathy, confusion, and unstable nature of political control. This has always been India’s sporting history, and no amount of journalism, activism, or legal reform has made a dent of any significance to this structure where, finally, the politician or his or her proxy running the sport, becomes far more important than the sport itself.

Changing this will be hard. Because, say, a law is enacted today to ban politicians from sports administrations, we all know that what will come in its place are the proxies of these same politicians.

Perhaps one way is to convince major Indian corporate houses to adopt a sport for 10 years, and run it with the same commitment to efficiency, return-to-investment, and accountability that is shown in the running of their business ventures? They have to be given free rein in appointing office bearers, coaches, etc., and the full support of the state machinery when it comes to providing the use of infrastructure like stadiums and training facilities, plus whatever budget is allocated by the central government for that particular sport.

2. Develop as a nation first

The question of why India’s vast population does not translate to an enormous talent pool from which Olympic medallists will emerge has been comprehensively answered in academic research. In a 2008 paper, economists Anirudh Krishna and Eric Haglund showed that India’s “effective participation rate”, that is, the percentage of the population with the resources, just enough financial stability, and access to sporting infrastructure is extremely small.

India is still one of the highest ranked countries in the world when it comes to child malnutrition and infant mortality rates. If a huge percentage of the population is struggling to even eat properly, how will they go on to become athletes? It’s as simple as that. On the other side of the spectrum, the positive relationship between Olympic success and improving human development indices has also been proved repeatedly.

India’s hopes for more Olympic medals two decades from now, hinges then on its ability to provide for its people.

The percentage of the population with the resources, just enough financial stability, and access to sporting infrastructure is extremely small. (Photo by Mam Ashfaq via Pexels)

3. Radically change the domestic coaching structure

Indian sports federations now routinely hire international coaches with the right pedigree, training and experience for their elite athletes or teams. Think of the German biomechanical pioneer and throws expert Klaus Bartonietz, fondly known around the world as “Dr Javelin”, who is Olympic gold-medallist Neeraj Chopra’s coach. Former South African international Craig Fulton is the coach of the men’s hockey team which performed brilliantly at the Asia Cup (Indian hockey has, in fact, consistently hired some of the best international coaches for its teams).

Now, along with hiring the best for their elite athletes and teams, what if each federation was also given the budget to hire a person of similar profile to run a coaches’ training programme in the sport for a period of 10 years, in which time he or she is given the team and resources to go around the country and hold workshops and implement changes in infrastructure and training modules at the grassroots level? It can only lead to a generation of informed coaches at all levels, and knowledge being passed on, and children being exposed to the right training environment from the very beginning, instead of when they have already acquired their fundamentals and reached the elite stage?

4. Strategic focus on sports and regions

The adage that India is a one-sport nation is slowly but surely losing ground. India, in fact, has a thriving culture of different sports in different pockets. Wrestling is the king of sports in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. Track & Field rules Kerala. Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and Punjab swear by hockey. Manipur, Mizoram, Assam and Haryana have superb judokas and boxers. West Bengal, Manipur and Maharashtra are deeply into weightlifting. These are not revelations, but long-established facts. But they are taken for granted. Instead of paying equal attention to any and all sports, most countries in the world pour most of their funding and attention in select sports that they are already good at. Turkey wins an outsized number of medals in Olympic wrestling. That could be India, if there was committed focus and funding for modern wrestling coaching and infrastructure in Haryana and Maharashtra, where scores of wrestling centres already exist, but where the coaching follows some ancient protocols and poor pedagogy that simply won’t cut it in the modern world.

Jamaica wins almost all its Olympic medals in sprinting, Kenya and Ethiopia in middle-and-long distance running. India is simply nowhere on the horizon in this, so it may be a good idea not to put too much priority on these sports.

Even top performing countries at the Olympics focus on a few disciplines—the US wins more than 65 per cent of its medals in athletics, swimming and gymnastics.

Another strategic move would be to look at certain sports with many medals on offer at the Olympics that don’t depend too much on a sporting culture (all-team sports and martial sports need a cultural component), or genetics (running and swimming have a strong relation to genes). There are certain sports that require a focused early childhood intervention for success, like gymnastics. China and Russia have had great success identifying children with gymnastic abilities and then taking over their lives for the next decade or so till they reached an elite level. This is not too hard to replicate. There are some other sports that are simply based on sports science, instead of a huge amount of skill acquisition. Two examples are rowing and shooting. Athletes routinely enter the sport as newbies, are put through a very structured and scientific process, and emerge champions within five years. Despite their spectacular failure at the Tokyo Olympics, Indian shooting has been on this path for a few years now, and success is bound to come their way sooner or later.

Sharper focus on sports like rowing, shooting, and wrestling - that Indians are already good at and where sports science has a large role to play - could help India win more medals sooner. (Photo by Run 4 FFWPU via Pexels)

5.   Sports science, sports science, sports science

All the major sporting nations have long realized that without cutting-edge sports science to support them, medals will remain a distant dream. Sports science is now inescapable. Data now determines with great precision what an individual athlete needs in terms of skill-acquisition, or spatial awareness, or physical development, or recovery, or injury management. The old way of one-size fits all is long gone.

Indian sports has taken some very good steps in this direction. The elite hockey teams, for example, work with sports scientists and use data in very effective ways. Neeraj Chopra’s training involves lots of scientific input. Abhinav Bindra, ever the visionary, began an initiative which has now resulted in multiple centres across India offering excellent sports science inputs and recovery and injury management programs. The JSW-run Inspire Institute of Sports has state-of-the-art facilities. Yet, this has not filtered down to where it is needed as much as it is needed for elite athletes—to the grassroots, for the young athletes in development. Also, unlike hockey, most other sporting disciplines have limited or no access to modern sports science. This should be an absolute priority for the government, who can work with private institutions like the IIS or the Abhinav Bindra Targeting Performance (ABTP), as well as leading universities and colleges to create facilities of its own, to push the adoption of sports science in all disciplines and engender an ecosystem for sports science to flourish as a profession.

This is exactly what Australia did with remarkable success (and many other countries have followed suit).

Australian athletes won just one silver and four bronze medals at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. This led to much soul-searching, and eventually, the formation of the Australian Institute of Sport in 1981. Since its formation, AIS has since become one of the world’s leading sports science institutes, working closely with the major universities in the country. A decade later, at the Barcelona Olympics, Australia had increased its tally to 27 medals. Four years later, it was 41. They have stayed in the zone ever since.