The Olympic Games, undoubtedly the biggest sporting event in the world, has indeed a mystic charm attached to it.
And, the ambition of every athlete, past and present, has been to win a medal at the quadrennial sporting extravaganza, or at least be provided with a chance to participate in these Games.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, obviously foresaw such a burning ambition developing among athletes across the world when he remarked,
“The Olympic Games were created for the exaltation of the individual athlete.”
Limited success
Successive generations of Indian athletes too have tried to follow the path of their brethren elsewhere, dreaming of Olympic glory, but with limited success, earned by the Indian hockey team during its halcyon days.
Yet, with the passage of time and with world championships also gaining prominence across various disciplines, it is a fact that the Ajitpal Singh-led Indian team would have quite happily swapped its 1975 World Cup for a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
While reasons for the debacle of the team eventually finishing a poor seventh in Montreal have been analysed threadbare many times over by now, the focus here, as we take the road to London, is whether winning medals at world championships is a clear indication of Indian athletes being ready for more Olympic medals.
End of the drought
This, especially, in the context of the clutch of medals, even if small in number, won by the country since 1996 when tennis ace Leander Paes brought to an end the medal drought suffered by India at the Olympics after 1980 by bringing home a bronze from Atlanta and in the process becoming only the second Indian to win an individual medal after K.D. Jadhav, who had won a wrestling bronze at the 1952 Games in Helsinki.
Paes, of course, was only a wild card entrant for the men’s singles in the Centennial Games.
But, Karnam Malleswari, who ensured that India remained within the medal tally in 2000 at Sydney, striking bronze in the women’s 69kg category in weightlifting, had a gold medal against her name from the 1995 world championship.
Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, who carried the baton forward, similarly had a silver medal from the 2003 World championship in Cyprus before he won a medal of the same hue at Athens in 2004. Abhinav Bindra, the pride and joy of the country in Beijing four years later, was a winner in his pet event at the 2006 world championship in Zagreb, before he shot down his rivals in the 10m air rifle to garner the first ever Indian individual gold medal at the Olympics. However, in the case of both Vijender Singh and Sushil Kumar, the other Indian heroes in Beijing with bronze medals in middleweight boxing and 66kg freestyle wrestling, success at the world championships in their respective disciplines was to be achieved only later. Perhaps, the two exceptions of world championship medallists failing to win an Olympic medal for India has been Anju Bobby George, who won the country’s first ever athletic medal on the world stage at Paris in 2003 and found herself just outside the medal bracket in 2004, and Manavjit Singh Sandhu, who in 2006 won a gold medal in trap at the worlds, but could only finish 10th in Beijing.
It is against this background that what Bindra blogged upon reaching Beijing four years ago, becomes all the more pertinent, “It is an amazing feeling to be in a place that is buzzing with world class athletes and everyone soaking up the experience, but yet all there with one big purpose — the ever elusive ‘gold’ medal.”
True, the Government has stepped in during recent times with an increased spending of a little over Rs. 135 crore for the preparation of the Indian contingent for the London Games, but then sadly, sustainable returns for the whopping sum are yet to be guaranteed as we wait for our athletes to deliver.
The prophetic words of the late Olympian Suresh Babu rings in one’s mind repeatedly,
“India will do well at the Olympics only if we produce world champions across various disciplines just as China does. Otherwise, it would always be an uphill task for our athletes… and this would mean that we need an ambitious scheme in place not focusing on one single Olympics or the Asian Games, but with an eye on the future.”
