India had come into these games hoping to improve on its Tokyo medal haul of seven medals, its best in any Games, proud that Neeraj Chopra had made history in Tokyo by becoming the first Indian to win a track and field gold and that in the javelin. But to the dismay of the Indians Chopra had to be satisfied with silver while Ashad Nadeem of Pakistan won gold after setting an Olympic record. A first individual gold for Pakistan in the Olympics, its previous golds being in hockey and its first medal in 32 years. It could not have been a more glorious Pakistani triumph …. Writes Mihir Bose
So, another Olympic Games has come and gone with wall-to-wall television coverage. The grim fears that terrorism could blight the Games, fears that were heightened by the coordinated arson attack on high-speed rail by suspected far-left anarchists hours before the opening of the Games, which showed the broad array of sophisticated security threats faced by French law enforcement officials, and forced Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, to abandon the Eurostar for the plane as he travelled for the opening ceremony, thankfully did not materialise. Even the polluted waters of the Seine, which delayed the men’s triathlon, did not cause as much of a disruption as was feared.
The 2024 Games were always going to be different, more so as the Olympics means so much to the French. The modern Olympics were started by Pierre Coubertin, a Frenchman, and Paris has always seen itself as the home of the Games as we have come to know it. And while the French have always paid due obeisance to the Greeks, who started the Olympics, they have also drawn the contrast between the fact that the Greek games were confined to people of pure Greek blood, with no women allowed to take part, while the Coubertin Olympics were international, even if in its early days, with much of the non-white world ruled by Europe, non-whites had few chances to participate let alone shine as they can now. The odd ones that did, like Jesse Owen, were remarkable not only their extraordinary sporting feats but the fact that they could leap across the race barrier and prove that black and brown people were not inferior to the whites.
What made 2024 all the more important for France was that it had waited a century to host the Games having tried and failed on three previous attempts losing to countries it did not expect to lose, 1992 Barcelona, 2008 Beijing and most galling of all 2012 to London. Even the right to stage 2024 came in what was effectively a one-horse race, reflecting the fact thar many nations no longer see hosting the Olympics as worth the cost and effort for the doubtful gains it produces. This led to many nations withdrawing leaving Paris and Los Angles in the race and the International Olympic Committee, masking the diminishing appeal of the Olympics, awarded Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028, thinking it was being very clever.
All this made Paris determined to be different which explained why the Opening Ceremony was not in a stadium but along the Seine. And while I must confess that there were moments during the ceremony as the boats containing the athletes went down the Seine when I nodded off, the torch lighting ceremony was unique with the Olympic flame normally seen in a stadium where the track and field athletics are held now a hot air ballon floating over Paris. This showed remarkable French imagination and no little skill.
The closing ceremony was even more remarkable when from the beginning you were always left guessing as to what might happen next. It started with a golden intergalactic traveller whose destination was always a mystery but whose mission it soon emerged was to show that Paris had produced a Games to remember. The show also broadcast France’s starting the modern Olympics and the role of Coubertin but if this was a display of nationalism it was also a necessary history lesson. At the end the claim of Thomas Jolly, the theatre and opera director of the closing ceremony stadium show of acrobatics, music and dancing, did not seem the typical outlandish boast that are always made after such events. “Humanity is beautiful when it comes together”. For the Games it did seem to come together. Nothing illustrated this better than Parisians, who had been cynical about the Games before it began with many leaving the city, took to it.
But now that the Games are history what the competing countries will care for is the medals tables and here too Paris was going to be different. In my youth the medal table meant the first two places were dominated by US and Soviet Union, a sporting rivalry to match the wider rivalry between these two post-war power blocks. In recent decades the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China has converted the Olympics into the fight for the top spot between USA and China which given their economic and political rivalry seems appropriate and shows how the Olympics are always in step with the wider world. Russia’s fall has been such that this time Russia was not even allowed to compete. America will claim it trounced China having won most medals although as the world outside America ranks on the basis of golds won China and America shared the top spot. Even then it required an American victory almost in the closing seconds of the Games to get there. That is when with the clock ticking away in the basketball court American women won their basketball final against French women and that by just one point maintaining the record of never having lost in the Olympics. This made America level with China on gold.
As was to be expected the developed world dominated with quite a war going on between Britain and France which France won although the British can always claim that its former colony Australia pipped the French. If the British cannot beat the French the Australians, so many of whom can trace their origins to Britain, can beat the French. Despite the British winning only 14 golds, their lowest since Athens in 2004, borrowing from the American play book they proudly proclaimed that their total medal haul of 65 was their second-best tally on foreign soil. It made Andy Anson, chief executive of the British Olympic Association, boast “So that’s something incredible to celebrate.”
But that is a claim that can hardly be made for another group of former British colonies. The three subcontinental countries India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. However you look at it there was no glory here. It was the old Olympic story of these countries with huge populations just not making their mark in the world’s greatest sporting contest.
Bangladesh maintained its dismal record of being the most populous country in the world which has never won an Olympic medal. The news it made during the games was not on the sporting pages but on the front pages because of the ousting of its Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from power.
India had come into these games hoping to improve on its Tokyo medal haul of seven medals, its best in any Games, proud that Neeraj Chopra had made history in Tokyo by becoming the first Indian to win a track and field gold and that in the javelin. But to the dismay of the Indians Chopra had to be satisfied with silver while Ashad Nadeem of Pakistan won gold after setting an Olympic record. A first individual gold for Pakistan in the Olympics, its previous golds being in hockey and its first medal in 32 years. It could not have been a more glorious Pakistani triumph. Nevertheless, this is the only medal Pakistan won but given it had only seven athletes covering the three sports of javelin, shooting and swimming that was not a bad haul. It is India and its virtual no-show in the medal table that is dismal.
Chopra’s was the only silver India won, the rest being bronze making a miserable Olympic haul of six. This from a team of 117 athletes is astonishing and even for the lone silver it had to wait until day 13th of the Games. This means that a country whose population of 1.4 billion making it the most populous country in the world finished 71st in the medal table outranked by Hong Kong, Taiwan, North Korea, Cuba and Saint Lucia a Caribbean island with just 180,000 people.
Experts see many reasons why India has such a poor record. Widespread poverty and malnourishment which means young people cannot reach their sporting potential.
In Poor Economics, Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo argue that high malnutrition is a significant contributor to India’s Olympics underperformance. The Global Hunger Index of 2023 shows that India has the highest child-wasting rate in the world, at 18.7 per cent which is worse than war-torn and famine-stricken Yemen (14.4 per cent) and Sudan (13.7 per cent).
The traditional Indian excuse for this is that India is a poor country. But as Bannerjee and Duflo point out, “Of course India is poor but not as poor as it used to be, and not nearly as poor as Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, each of which, per head, has more than 10 times India’s medal count”.
Compared to wealthier nations India spends a pittance. When despite the system, athletes manage to emerge there is in India lack of investment even at the elite level. Vinesh Phogat, India’s star wrestler who was disqualified when she failed to make the weight for her women’s 50kg final, got a grant of around £75,000 for her training and support team. This is peanuts compared to what other nations spent or the wealth of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the richest cricket League in the world which provides cricketers undreamt of riches.
The other problem is investment does not often take place at the grassroots but comes only for three or four months once athletes qualify for the Olympics. Chopra has no doubt that if Indian athletes received resources from a year or two before the Games India would climb up the medal table. People who run Indian sport do not seem to understand that for an athlete it is a big jump from competing at a state level, progressing to national level and finally the international level.
But while all this can explain why India is a sporting midget at the Olympics there is a deeper reason. Years ago, when I was writing my book The Magic of Indian Cricket Ashwini Kumar, then the supremo of Indian Olympics, said Indians are not interested in competitive sport only Khel Kud, running around in a Maidan. Indian parents did not see anything to be gained by encouraging their children to take to sport. The wanted their sons to be doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants.
This also bred a mentality of being satisfied with the odd medal at the Olympics. When I was growing up India’s only chance of a medal was in hockey, a sport India dominated from 1928 to 1960 before Pakistan beat India. If the hockey team returned with gold India was happy. I witnessed what this mentality can produce during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 when I was the BBC Sports Editor. Indian hockey had fallen so far that it did not even qualify for the Games. But when India won its first ever individual gold and this in the men’s 10m rifle shooting at Beijing. Indians could not contain their joy. When I pointed out this was poor reward for a country like India I was brushed aside. Then came Chopra’s javelin win in Tokyo three years ago which again was rapturously received. However, until Tokyo, India had won a grand total of 28 medals across 36 Olympics which equalled the individual record of one man, the American swimmer Michael Phelps. Consider that the 28 included a record 11 Olympic medals, including eight golds in hockey. The total after Paris has reached 41 but that is still nothing to draw comfort from.
India’s may have the fifth biggest economy ahead of its old conqueror Britain but when it comes to Olympics it is still a poor colony looking up to its master. Paris saw Britain pass 1,000 medals in the Olympics. Yes, it has been taking part long before India but consider that in Paris 131 out of 327 British athletes won a medal , 40 per cent of the team, with 18 sports represented on the medal tables. India has been an independent country for 77 years and even after that to be so far behind is a sorry commentary on the country.
The comparison with China emphasises this even more. India beat China in the population contest around mid-2023. But in sports it lags so far behind that it might as well be on another planet. However, mention how successful China is in world sport and the point made is that China is a dictatorship. It has created a factory style sports production system where they identify children from the age of four and five years and put them into public hostels and in training. China has more than 2,183 state schools that train children as young as five to groom them for the Olympics.
India as a democracy cannot do that and is also not helped by the fact that sport is not run centrally from Delhi but by various state government with their own agendas. Also, unlike China, India does not see winning sports medals as being crucial in the soft power war between India and other countries and help promote its global brands. Yoga is more important. Narendra Modi is proud of persuading the United Nations to have an annual International Day for Yoga.
China is not the only one to use sport. Qatar has also done so but this is by importing athletes from other countries, not a route for India.
What is needed is a fundamental change in the Indian mind set. India is like a child, who not able to get the whole cake it desires, is satisfied by a small slice. That attitude of being too easily satisfied with its very limited success must change.
The Paris Olympics illustrated that. Yes, Chopra deserves congratulations on being the only Indian to win silver. The hockey team is also to be applauded for showing its worth by winning a second straight bronze at Paris after ending a 41-year medal drought at Tokyo.
But to take comfort from such small drops of success means there is not the urge to improve and take on the world. For India to break through it needs as a nation to be angry, question why it is such a sporting failure and vow to compete with the best in the world. Unless there is such a change in the mind set India will always be the also ran in Olympics and Indian sport lovers will look down the table to find out where they have finished.
(Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British)