How can India improve in sports?
India needs to stop the heroism approach and focus on process innovation. Indian approach to sports is results oriented and not focused on reproducibility. What do I mean by this? Someone who is able to bring home a medal typically has the latent talent identified, is paired up with the best amenities and given a fighting chance. However there is no systemic method to groom these latent abilities by creating a repeatable process.
what is process innovation? Process innovation is typically a method to improve process where the sporting infrastructure develops institutional memory to create champions. This means building infrastructure that is not beholden to individual coaches or athletes but a culture where sports science, bio mechanics, informatics and computer vision are all introduced to provide mathematical, statistical and evidence based training methodologies to athletes based on diet.
the problem with Indian sports are that champions are elevated and given disproportionate attention and resources. This creates a culture of heroism and hero worship. This is not a scalable strategy since the results the hero creates is not repeatable. India is stuck in the result oriented approach with hero celebration. This creates false positives in the sense that we have a sporting culture. The PHOEREN coaches are probably introducing the idea of process innovation but we need Indian sporting infrastructure to develop native talent to create this mindset.
the goal is to democratize performance in sports by creating systemic methods and infrastructure to extract higher performance for average atheles. India cannot depend on latent talent to secure top spots at olympics. Statistically these will be one offs. The other benefit of institutional sporting memory is that the average performance will be close to world class athletes and the latent superstars will dominate.
thats my 2 cents
