Road to Rio: The great Indian dream

It was sheer fortuity that my stepping into the teens coincided with India ceasing to exist as a nation of great intrigue with its door closed on the world. Slowly but surely, a Pepsi or a Coke became not as precious as ‘Ganga Jal’; more and more Indian feet started romancing Nike and Reebok; a Hyundai or a Daewoo comfortably standing next to an Amby and Lamby became a common sight at traffic signals, the Indian digestive system started to feel comfortable with a Mcburger as it did with an aloo paratha, and the television remote control which was almost redundant till then, suddenly started to take control of our lives. Clearly, India was changing. India was undoubtedly getting bigger and perhaps, better!

The folks of my generation realised quite early in our lives that we needed to be very moderate in our expectations as Indian sports fans. We were too young for the LA games. While Seoul and Barcelona took us through some stupendous sporting action and introduced some fabulous athletes to us, our country was nowhere on the map! Winning a medal seemed a distant dream. And that was why the teenagers in us celebrated for days together, when Leander put us on the sporting map again in ’96 with a bronze. In 2012, it went one step further when Mary Kom apologised to the nation for not winning a gold with an Olympic bronze medal around her neck. Initially it came across as a culture shock but then the dawn of a new era in the Indian sporting landscape was more evident than ever! Such was the jubilation and optimism floating in the air, that it made all of us wonder that finally we might have reached somewhere and are heading in the right direction. Or are we?

The Indian contingent boarded its flight to London with hopes heavily pinned on the boxers, archers and the shooters. There was good reason for that too with India fielding a young and highly talented men’s boxing team riding high on Vijender’s bronze from the Beijing edition, while Col. Rathore’s Silver in Athens followed by Abhinav Bindra’s gold in Beijing had given Indian shooting a new address. World no. 1 Deepika Kumari led the Indian archery charge, and with the world cup silver-winning men’s recurve team in its ranks, the archery team looked strong! Surely India could have brought home more medals than six?

Vijender & co couldn’t live up to the expectations, and India’s only joy from the boxing ring came when Mary Kom punched above her weight (quite literally, as she had to fight in a heavier weight category than her usual) to win India its solitary medal in boxing.

When the much-fancied archery team drew a blank, it further dented India’s expectations. India’s only ‘gold man’ Abhinav Bhindra couldn’t come anywhere close to his Beijing magic, but there was a ‘silver’ lining in the form of shooter Vijay Kumar, while veteran Gagan Narang’s bronze was the icing on the cake.

Wrestler Sushil Kumar created history by upgrading the colour of the medal he had won in Beijing, and Yogeswar Dutt added a bronze to it—India was having its best-ever Olympic outing. Saina Nehwal’s bronze in badminton meant that India signed off from London with its medal tally touching the half-dozen mark.

Expecting the Indian sports authorities and administrative bodies to wake up and change radically is naive, to say the least! Many of the men governing Indian sports administrative bodies never had much to do with sports. Promoting Indian sport was the last thing on their agenda and it continues to be so. The few achievements of Indian sports have not been because of them, rather despite them!

Any genuine attempt to promote Indian sport should start with cleansing the system and getting the right people at the helm, driving the great Indian sporting ambition with a vision and focus which is non-negotiable. Meanwhile, it sounds silly when someone says cricket is killing every other sport in India! One sport can’t kill another one! No sport in India will be robbed off its space, following and money if it’s guided by people with vision, determination and selfless ambitions! The bottle neck, as they say, is at the top!

The Indian Archery team is still a force to reckon with, but there wouldn’t be too much hype about them this time around, given their performance four years back. That could just work in their favour.

There are talks of India pulling off some surprises in track-and-field with the discus thrower Vikas Gowda leading that pack of dark horses. Expecting a few of them to be in the medal zone is all right, but expecting a medal will be a touch too ambitious!

Then comes tennis. The issues with Indian tennis are well documented. From ego clashes to player revolts, from selection bans to forming new player associations, we have seen it all. Still, it’s a mystery to many as to how India failed to win a medal in tennis after Leander’s heroics in Atlanta twenty years ago! We had our brightest chances in Sydney in 2000 and in Athens four years later, with the ‘Lee-Hesh’ duo being one of the most formidable doubles pairs of that era. Indian tennis still has enough fire power to win an Olympic medal with Sania’s recent form and performances shining as the brightest spot!

And finally, one can’t help getting a bit emotional, when one thinks of Hockey! India is still the most successful country in men’s Olympic hockey with eight gold medals, but we haven’t had a podium finish in almost four decades! At best we are on a path of revival at the moment and some massive work needs to be done to even partially restore the old glory. After failing to qualify for the Beijing edition of the games, the only time in history this has happened, and a forgettable outing in London where we finished at the bottom of the table, the early signs for Rio are good! Indian men were the first team to qualify for Rio and that augurs well.

The fall of Indian Hockey from dizzy heights to an unbelievable nadir has to be one the biggest tragedies of our times and a classic example of how the administration ruined a sport which was once India’s pride! Indian hockey for long has been like a helpless child whose parents were fighting in the court for its custody. It has been trampled mercilessly by the same people who were responsible for nurturing it. Instead of love, care, unity and good performances, there have been fragmentation, ego, evolvement of rival federations, disappointing performances and despair. But the recovery appears to have finally taken seed.

And now going back to where we started, we can’t be a true global power with our largely invisible status in international sport, our outstanding achievements in other spheres not withstanding. Sport has the power to inspire, change the world and re-define the pride and worth of a nation. So what should we, the billion people whom the few selected and privileged ones will be representatives of in Rio, do now? Let’s take a break from fault-finding, pointing fingers, ruing the lack of visionaries in administration, fretting over the challenges and deficiencies.....No, it’s not the time to do that any more...not till the curtains are down in Rio! It’s the time for us to rally behind our athletes, to let them know that we are proud of them, that we have faith in them.