Not enough emphasis placed on sport in struggle for existence
“The middle class is sedentary and goes to sports arenas only to have a good evening out — kids, colas, burgers. They don’t go to sports events to savour sport; few Indians play sport and understand sport. This class wants its kids to become MBAs/doctors/engineers, not sportspersons wasting their time in the sun; but this class is the noisiest in asking why Indians don’t win medals in the Olympics.”
By Rohit Mahajan
Are Indian athletes, as writer-socialite Shobhaa De believes, a “waste” of money and opportunity? Her comments on sport from an inexpert point of view probably don’t deserve much attention, but what she said is actually believed by a very large number of Indian people.
What is the intrinsic worth of sport? Sport is an activity which has no worth of its own — what’s productive about hitting a ball with a hockey stick or a tennis racquet, or what’s materially useful about being the fastest runner in the world?
The real beauty of sport lies in playing it, and all of us have felt a high when we’ve sprinted very fast, done brisk climbing up a mountain, hit a good straight drive in cricket, played a role in the creation of a football goal or smashed the badminton shuttle across the net.
As novice athletes, we’ve loved sport, for it leads us to a great physical and spiritual high.
But when we’re merely watchers, the fans and the nationalist nation-lovers, medals for India in events such as the Olympics are a boost to the national pride.
What a brilliant doctor or engineer can’t do, a sportsperson can do — boost the pride of the nation, prove that our country’s people are no physical weaklings; that in a contest of physical strength and speed, we too can do well.
When we were growing up in the 1980s, there was only one event we looked forward to when it was time for the Olympics — hockey. The moment India’s hockey hopes faded, we’d stop hoping for a medal for India.
But now we had realistic hopes of winning medals in shooting, archery, tennis, boxing, wrestling, badminton. We’re competitive in many events; that’s progress of a kind. From a no-hoper nation whose Olympics began and ended with hockey, we’ve come quite far.
But medals are not handed on a platter in the Olympics. Shobhaa De, who has written novels, will appreciate that the Nobel Prize for literature, or the Booker Prize, can’t be won by every writer. For athletes, an Olympics gold is akin to what the Booker or the Nobel Prize is for writers. Not everyone gets the Nobel, and not everyone gets the Olympics gold or, for that matter, any Olympics medal.
India’s desperate hunt for gold, or any other medal, and failure to win it makes millions of fans feel humiliated and angry. Medals in Rio would have helped people feel proud about being Indian; Shobhaa De was the voice of this group of people when she attacked the athletes for not making her feel proud for being Indian.
Abhinav Bindra’s German coach Heinz Reinkemeier thinks that Indian media’s (and fans’) desperation for medals makes them blind to the complexity of sport; he says for sportspersons, achievement is not measured only in medals. A sportsperson can be a great achiever in an event, even if he/she didn’t win a medal.
“This is a problem of the Indian media, they just come and want gold,” says Reinkemeier. “They are not interested in the sport or the individual. They just want gold!”
“Maybe this is something only in India,” he said. “You have athletes who don’t have good training facilities, like in Europe or maybe China, and you keep asking why you did not get gold! Try to understand that a good performance is valued on its own.”
It’s impossible for Indians to understand what it takes to win an Olympics medal; sport is a luxury for most Indians, who are caught up in a fight for bare existence. The middle class is sedentary and goes to sports arenas only to have a good evening out — kids, colas, burgers. They don’t go to sports events to savour sport; few Indians play sport and understand sport.
This class wants its kids to become MBAs/doctors/engineers, not sportspersons wasting their time in the sun; but this class is the noisiest in asking why Indians don’t win medals in the Olympics.
“You’ve got to hold a gun and have a session shooting session to know what it takes,” says Gagan Narang, a medallist in the 2012 London Olympics.
“You saw what happened inside?” says Narang, after failed to make the final. “The pressure is very high, and these are all great shooters. They all train for eight years for this half-hour. It’s very very difficult, most people don’t understand how difficult sport is.”
Most of our sportspersons come from the underprivileged groups of our society; they come to sport because they are seeking government jobs. Maybe there will be a time when each child in India would have access to good sports facilities, and middle and upper classes will encourage their children to become sportspersons.
Then more Indians, including Shobhaa De, will understand sport. But not before that.
