Why we cut such a sorry figure in international sport
Agreed, Milkha Singh was the best athlete India has produced. His 400 m national record was not broken for almost four decades. What gave him added stature was his background: He came from a poor family and lost both his parents in the trauma and bloodshed of Partition. From a refugee camp he managed to get into the Army, though only in his fourth attempt. From such humble and deprived beginnings, to become one of the best runners in the world in the 200m and 400 m displays extraordinary grit and determination that can only be hugely admired.
But the sad reality is that he only came fourth when it really mattered internationally, in the 400 m in the 1960 Rome Olympics, not even getting a bronze medal, though he had won gold in the Commonwealth and Asian Games. I got to know him a little when living in Chandigarh in the 1980s. He also built a house on the outskirts of Kasauli, in Himachal, where I have a family home. We managed to get him to address a session at the 2013 Khushwant Singh Litfest at Kasauli Club. On the dais was also Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, the maker of that marvellous film ‘Bhaag Milkha Bhaag’, in my view the best biopic ever made on an Indian sportsperson. The session was packed. Milkha had everybody spellbound as he talked about his life in colloquial Hindi, with some Punjabi thrown in. Modest to a fault, he self-deprecatingly confessed to being “unpadh” (without formal education). He won over everybody.
I have always wondered why, as the second most populous nation in the world, we cut such a sorry figure in sports. In the Olympics, we have won just one solitary individual gold medal, that of Abhinav Bindra in shooting. The total number of individual Olympic medals won by India can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In hockey, after being dominant in the years before and after Independence, we have been nowhere since 1980. The only Olympic sports where India has shown some promise are badminton, boxing, wrestling, shooting and archery.
Let’s now turn to the country we consider our main rival in more ways than one — China. It has won a humongous 546 Olympic medals, 224 of them gold. We like to claim that India scores in “soft” power. Well, sports is very much a “soft” power where China is streets ahead. Apart from Bindra, India has had few world champions: Viswanathan Anand in chess (though some would not consider it a “sport”), Wilson Jones and Pankaj Advani in billiards, Mirabai Chanu in weightlifting, PV Sindhu, Prakash Padukone and Pullela Gopichand in badminton (the last two won the All England Championship, considered the world’s prime badminton tournament). In tennis, Sania Mirza, the best women’s player India has produced, has won six doubles Grand Slams. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi have done even better. But the trouble is that nobody really considers doubles in the same league as singles, and in singles, no Indian has even reached a Grand Slam final. In the sport that is gaining increasing popularity, golf, there was actually an ethnic Indian who became the world number one, Vijay Singh, but he was a Fijian and hence does not count.
A prime reason why India has done so poorly in sport is that most of our sports bodies have been headed by politicians and civil servants. Their main interest was in getting publicity and patronage for themselves, and being able to go abroad with their respective teams (while enjoying a generous per diem allowance), not in furthering the interest of the sport they were in charge of. When India did produce world-beaters, as in badminton, with the likes of Saina Nehwal, PV Sindhu and Srikanth Kidambi, it was mainly because sportspersons, such as Padukone and Gopichand, had set up coaching academies, thereby sidelining the government. Even Ramanathan Krishnan, who was a semi-finalist in Wimbledon twice, owed his prowess to his father coaching him on a private court, not to official assistance. The same goes for Bindra, whose father, too, was the main influencer and financer of his son’s success.
You would have noticed that I have made no mention of cricket. For good reason. Though we may not like it, since it has become a national passion, akin to religion, it is not in my view an international sport. It is played seriously by exactly 10 countries, all from the Commonwealth. Outside them, even avid sports fans know little or nothing about cricket. When Russian tennis superstar Maria Sharapova was once asked ahout Sachin Tendulkar, she looked blank and confessed she had no idea who he was! Other icons like Sunil Gavaskar, Rahul Dravid and Kapil Dev, even Virat Kohli, household names here, are virtually unknown outside the cricketing world. On the other hand, Usain Bolt, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Lewis Hamilton are international stars who have excelled in sports played, or followed, by millions in virtually every country. Cricket has strangled Indian sport by cornering finances and focusing too much attention, especially of the young, on it. Until that focus, along with the money that goes with it, shifts elsewhere, there is no hope of India becoming a sporting power.
— The writer is a veteran journalist
