With 1.3 billion people and 35 medals ever, India remains an Olympic mystery:
Scroll, and scroll, and scroll, down the Olympic medal table, and let the eyeballs reach 47th place. There glows maybe the most curious case on the whole kaleidoscopic chart.
That would be India, fascinating in every regard while also baffling regarding Olympics. It has the world’s silver medal population tally (1.339 billion), its gold medal population of exuberance (581 million people between ages 0 and 24) and chronic trouble getting medals (35 in its Olympic history, or seven more than Michael Phelps). When it up and beat the curtain drop here and snared its first Tokyo gold medal on Saturday night, Neeraj Chopra’s exhilarating win in the javelin, it vaulted from a 66th-place logjam with Armenia, the Dominican Republic and Kyrgyzstan, whose populations add up to roughly that of metro Mumbai, to a 47th-place spot tucked between Romania, Venezuela and Hong Kong, whose populations add up to less than five percent of India.
… In a telephone interview, he outlined five explanations for how India has numbers such as just 10 gold medals across 121 Olympic years (eight of those from field hockey).
First, the India of yore never much linked sport and nationalism. “The emphasis was not really on sporting excellence or sporting nationalism, which happens in a country like China or in a way the Soviet bloc,” he said (and could have included the United States as well). He told of an old ethic: “‘The point is to play the sport. The point is not winning.’”
Second, as far as a national project such as China’s Project 119, well, “India never really had anything like that,” Sen said.
Third, the socioeconomic, the “poor health, infrastructure, nutrition,” Sen said, which mean: “The participation is very low. A very small amount of the population has the luxury of taking part in sport.” He said, “There was also, among Indian elites, those who certainly had access, you might add that is the sort of culture, parents would emphasize more doing well in academics.” And for the middle class: “If I want to survive, if you want to have a living, don’t focus on sports. I think that was, for a long time, part of the middle-class ethos.”
Fourth: “India did not have a sort of winning tradition in one particular sport,” Sen said, referring to individual sports and calling to mind the way Australia’s excellence in swimming helps generate energy toward Australia’s excellence in general.
And fifth: “As incubators of sport, India did not have anything like the university system in the United States.”
(Bangladesh is the most populous country never to medal)
