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India’s time starts now if it is serious about Mission Olympic 2020
The question now remains whether the country can not just improve its Rio tally, but if it can acquit itself creditably at Tokyo, and what it must do to get there.
Who's Game?
A Marathon, Not a Sprint
(Additional reporting by Malini Goyal)
READ MORE:
Tokyo|Sunday ET|Rahul Dravid|Olympic Gold Quest|Mukesh Ambani|Great Britain|Baban Bhokanal
The question now remains whether the country can not just improve its Rio tally, but if it can acquit itself creditably at Tokyo, and what it must do to get there.
Despite its great importance, cricket never gave India — the nation — any significant international triumph until well after independence. It was in Indian hockey and in the Olympic Games that the nationalist aspirations of colonial India found full expression," wrote Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta in India and the Olympics.
India first participated as a team in the Olympics in 1920 (the first colonised Asian nation to take part in the Games, as the authors point out), set up the Indian Olympic Association by 1927 and won its first gold, in hockey, the very next year.
Four years from now, when the Olympics begin in Tokyo in 2020, it will mark a century since India first sent a team to the Games and should be a time to celebrate a centenary of Olympic participation. But in the shadow of the dismal show at Rio where the largest ever contingent of 118 athletes managed to pick up just two medals, the idea of celebration sounds farfetched, even farcical.
Read: Britain began preparing for Rio the day after the 2008 Olympics ended: Simon Timson, UK SportThe athletes are now back home, medal winners like Sakshi Malik and PV Sindhu got a rapturous reception from a grateful nation, and the dust of one more Olympic Games is settling. With the dream of India bettering its London tally of six medals getting a rude awakening, the question now remains whether the country can not just improve its Rio tally, but if it can acquit itself creditably at Tokyo, and what it must do to get there.
Who's Game?
On Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said a task force would be set up to prepare a comprehensive action plan for not just 2020, but also 2024 and 2028. Its mandate would include infrastructure, training and selection of athletes and there are reports suggesting that officials might even be held accountable, which would be a welcome strategy.
The government launched a long-term scheme in 2014, the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS). Its chairperson Anju Bobby George says the focus was always on the 2020 and 2024 Games, and that the success of the scheme should not be judged by the performance at Rio. (See "The Big Results..."). George says the athletes for 2020 have already been selected while those for 2024 will be selected next year. However, others point out that though the plan is great in theory, so far TOPS ended up just being a funding vehicle. George acknowledges the shortcomings and says there will be greater focus on assessing training, not just financing elite athletes.
Intriguingly, when ET Magazine tried to contact N Ramachandran, president of the Indian Olympic Association, for his views on India's performance and the way forward, his office replied that he was still in Rio. Ramachandran himself replied by text message that he was abroad, though he did not confirm where. He is the brother of N Srinivasan, former president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India.
Another avenue being debated is an increased role for India Inc in supporting the efforts for preparations, particularly in a country where the government might concentrate public spending on priority areas like health and education.
"Now that 2% corporate social responsibility (CSR) funding includes Olympic sports, Indian corporates have a great opportunity to help bring pride to the nation," says Niraj Bajaj, director at Bajaj Group, Arjuna awardee and a three-time table tennis champion.
Read: The big results under TOPS scheme will come in 2020 and 2024: Anju Bobby GeorgeThis Olympics, incidentally, saw the highest participation from the corporate sector, with nine companies coming on board as sponsors for the Indian contingent.
Financial services company Edelweiss was the principal sponsor, with benefits including a Rs 1 crore life insurance cover for every athlete.
"Corporate India can take the lead and make a difference by setting up sports-related infrastructure, investing in different sports verticals, from equipment and training to diet and nutrition, to augment their marketing efforts through active sponsorship of sports beyond cricket," says Rashesh Shah, chairman, Edelweiss Group.
Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy has a more radical idea to increase private-sector participation in the preparation for the Games, suggesting that each discipline can be taken up by a company, with all costs up to the 2024 Olympics being borne by the respective company.
The main caveat? That sponsoring companies be given full freedom to conduct training without any interference from associations or the government.
"Participating in the 2020 Olympics will be a bonus," he adds. Companies say a major impediment to funding sports remains a lack of transparency, which is why many in the private sector prefer to put money in independent foundations like Olympic Gold Quest, GoSports Foundation and JSW Sports, rather than the much criticised sports federations.
(IndiaSpend, a data journalism website, recently pointed out that only one of the 27 sporting federations has an athlete as president, while many former athletes have spoken out about the corruption and stifling bureaucracy in many of these bodies.)
Genpact, for instance, has signed a five-year agreement with Olympic Gold Quest to fund the training of its women athletes as part of its gender diversity programme, which will stretch till the 2020 Games.
The good news is that corporate interest has also been increasing in supporting the Olympics beyond sponsorships, says Nandan Kamath, managing trustee of GoSports Foundation, which supported five Olympians this year, including Dipa Karmakar.
"Funding has been increasing 100% year-onyear for the past three-four years," he says. The foundation's executive director Deepthi Bopaiah says there was also a surge in the last 20 days, leading to the Rio Olympics.
For the elite athletes, the budget can be up to Rs25 lakh a year and they hope to spend Rs30-35 lakh a year for the next four years on Karmakar alone. The AV Birla group has pumped in more than Rs1 crore in the last three years in the foundation's programme with Rahul Dravid.
But increased funding by itself might not solve the conundrum of why a country of a billion-plus continues to languish near the bottom of the Olympics medal tally.
Read: India needs a complete revision on where and how its money for sports has been spentEven the UK, which created history by beating China to the second position at Rio, aided by consistent, long-term investment in elite sports, underlines that it's not just about the amount of funding but how it's utilised.
Former tennis player Manisha Malhotra, who was heading the LN Mittal-funded Mittal Champions Trust before it wound up in 2014, agrees: "The only thing not missing this year was the money." She stresses on accountability of each stakeholder, the athlete, the coach and the federation members.
"Everybody should be bound by the results. If they do not deliver, they should be fired. It's not just the athletes who should be under pressure, people around them should be also held accountable." The country also needs to re-examine how it identifies the talent that can go to the Olympics, a change that needs to start from the grassroots level.
"We don't have a system in place for identifying aptitude. We support people who have already broken through by themselves. In India, the talent has to find the opportunity, not the other way around," says GoSports' Kamath.
This year's Olympic contingent alone is full of such examples. Like OP Jaisha, the marathoner, whose talent was discovered by chance when as a teenager, she was persuaded into participating in a local 800 metre race after last-minute dropouts.
Or, Lalita Babar, the first Indian woman to qualify for an Olympic track-and-field final after PT Usha. In between helping her family battle the drought in Satara, she began with playing kho kho, entering athletics later and focusing on the steeplechase only two years ago. Dattu Baban Bhokanal, the sculler who qualified for the Olympics, had only been rowing professionally since 2012, when the stone-crusher's son joined the army.
Enabling these sportspersons to be full-time athletes by providing a separate living allowance, like in the UK, might also show results. Maneesh Bahuguna, who heads sports management firm Anglian Medal Hunt, says that because many athletes come from economically weak families, he has seen a drastic 80% drop in motivation once they reach a certain level of economic security, such as a PSU job.
"You will find that many athletes who have won gold at the Commonwealth and Asian Games go off the radar," says Bahuguna, who helped fund Babar and boxer Shiva Thapa, among others. But Bahuguna says it is finally up to the athlete. "It's not like Mukesh Ambani's son winning a medal. At the end of the day, they are the ones who have to be on the field at 4 am every day."
A Marathon, Not a Sprint
Bahuguna is not too hopeful of change in the immediate future. "To put it bluntly, even in 2020, we won't do well. The fact of the matter is that all the vested interests are still in place." Initiatives like Anglian Medal Hunt, he says, are far too small in a nation of over a billion to have a major impact.
Viren Rasquinha, CEO of Olympic Gold Quest, which supports 78 athletes across eight disciplines at different stages, concurs. "There is space for at least 100 more organisations like OGQ. Also, there should be organisations supporting athletes at the grass-root and lower levels."
Consistent Olympic medal winners usually train for the Games with an eight- or even 12-year horizon and that's the competition India needs to overcome.
One solution, says former Olympic-level swimmer Nisha Millet, would be to send elite athletes to train where the best facilities are available, such as the US or Australia for swimmers. "At Tokyo, the best we can look at is making it to the semifinals in swimming. Ideally, we should be focusing on our 14-yearolds and enabling them to train abroad for the next eight years," says Millet, whose parents had to sell their house to finance her training.
Union Sports Minister Vijay Goel himself told the media last week that India needs to start preparing immediately for the Games in Tokyo.
He now needs to ensure that the government, the federations and every other stakeholder stay the course.
(Additional reporting by Malini Goyal)
READ MORE:
Tokyo|Sunday ET|Rahul Dravid|Olympic Gold Quest|Mukesh Ambani|Great Britain|Baban Bhokanal
