JEREMY COPELAND:
Slower, lower, weaker: India at the Olympic Games
CBC News Viewpoint | August 18, 2004 | More from Jeremy Copeland
A commentator on the local TV coverage of the first day of the Olympics summed up India's shortcomings at the Games. After his colleague speculated about Michael Phelps's chances of setting a record for winning the most gold medals at one Games the commentator said: "Isn't it amazing that here we are talking about the possibility of one athlete taking seven gold medals and our country of one billion people may not even win a single bronze medal?"
India's performance in past Olympics has been, to put it mildly, disappointing. At the Sydney Games four years ago India won just one bronze medal. That was in weightlifting. Tennis provided India with its only medal of the 1996 Atlanta Games, that one also a bronze. Before Athens, the only other medal India had ever won in an individual sport at the Olympics was also a bronze in wrestling at the 1952 Games in Helsinki.
Olympic archers compete in the Olympic ranking round in Athens, Thursday Aug. 12, 2004. At right is Satyadev Prasad of India. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
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India's field hockey team has a fantastic history of success, winning eight gold, one silver and two bronze medals, but the last time the players tasted success was in Moscow in 1980. The team isn't expected to win a medal this time around.
Novelist and cultural commentator Shashi Tharoor says people in the country have grown used to looking down to the bottom of the list of medal-winning countries searching for India. "We have all known the shame of waiting day after day for India to appear on the list at all, as countries a hundredth our size record gold upon gold and Indian athletes are barely mentioned among the also-rans."
So why does a country with the world's second-largest population produce so few world-class athletes? Some people point out that India is a developing country that can't afford to compete with athletic programs in Europe and the U.S. The problem with this explanation is that much smaller developing countries like Ethiopia and Jamaica regularly see their runners standing on the winner's podium.
Besides, while a third of Indians live in desperate poverty, there is a fast-growing middle class in this country that already numbers more than 200 million. That's a huge potential pool of athletes.
India's players defend their goal as Netherlands' shot the penalty corner during their 2004 Olympic Games field hockey match at the Helliniko hockey center in Athens, Greece, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2004. The Netherlands won 3-1. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)
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Tharoor says a lack of sponsorship and support for Indian athletes is a big part of the problem. "The incentives for success are not great. The years of sacrifice and effort it takes to become a world-class athlete are simply not a realistic option to an Indian who needs to make a living, and sponsors are few and far between."
Another possible explanation is that young Indian children don't have many role models to inspire them to pursue Olympic sports. The only sport that people seem to care about in India is cricket. The game is a national obsession and all over the country all year round you can see boys and men, young and old, playing cricket in streets, parks and open fields. It's rare to see anyone playing any other sport.
Cricket players get all of the fame and fortune that come with being a sporting superstar. The young boys all dream of being the next Sachin Tendulkar or Rahul Dravid – India's equivalent of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux.
Another challenge facing young athletes here is a lack of training facilities such as gymnasiums, running tracks and swimming pools. The vast majority of Indians can't even swim, let alone hope to one day compete with the likes of Michael Phelps or Ian Thorpe.
India's need for sporting facilities received international attention at the 1992 Miss Universe competition. India's Madhu Sapre, who was also an athlete, made it down to the final three competitors. One by one, Dick Clark asked each woman what would be the first thing she would do if she became the leader of her country. The first two women talked about helping children and bringing peace and prosperity to their countries.
When it was Sapre's turn, she replied: "I'll open up a big, biggest, uh, I can say, sports track and field ground in India because I think we are lacking."
The judges didn't like her answer and she finished as 2nd runner-up. The judges might have been able to appreciate Sapre's reply if they knew how desperate Indians are for sporting success.
Pankaj Jhamubhai Patel, 24, gets his hair styled with the Olympic rings and 'Athens' in Ahmadabad, India, Saturday, Aug. 14, 2004. (AP Photo/Pankaj Nangia)
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Incidentally, beauty pageants are one place India has done extremely well in international competition. In the last 10 years the country has captured two Miss Universe and four Miss World crowns.
Coming into Athens India had some legitimate medal hopes. Long jumper Anju Bobby George, who carried the Indian flag at the opening ceremony, has an outside shot of winning a bronze medal.
India's tennis star Leander Paes won the bronze medal in Atlanta in 1996. This time the country is hoping that he and his partner Mahesh Bhupathi will win a medal in the men's doubles. The pair is ranked fifth so they'll have to overachieve to win even a bronze.
India also has a chance of winning medals in weightlifting, shooting and archery.
But this story has a happy ending. On Day 4 of the Games, India's Major Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won a silver medal at the shooting centre in the men's double trap. It's the country's best result ever for an individual athlete and has at least temporarily fired India into the top 25 of the list of medal winners. The lone silver may not send millions of Indian children running to tracks, swimming pools and gyms, but it's a shot in the right direction.
India is unlikely to strike gold in Athens, but there's new hope that four years from now in Beijing we'll hear India's national anthem played at the Olympic Games for the first time since 1980.
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JEREMY COPELAND
FREELANCE WRITER
Jeremy Copeland is the CBC's videojournalist in India. From New Delhi he
also writes for the Globe and Mail and does news and documentaries for CBC
and BBC Radio. He joined the CBC in 1998 and worked as a senior writer at
Newsworld before moving to London in 2000. He joined BBC World Television
and worked as a senior broadcast journalist on the hourly newscasts until
moving to India in 2003.
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