Silver Lining
Our cricket-crazy nation gets a wake-up call around every Olympics. The Indian contingent at Rio delivered little, but at least our athletes strived for greatness
there were several ways to watch the Rio Olympics. You could wake up early in the mornings to marvel at the two greatest athletes in history, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, as they pushed the boundaries of human excellence in the winter of their careers. You could follow the medals table and wonder how the United States won across 25 disciplines, and how Britain managed to pip China in a photo-finish for second place. Or you could assiduously follow the fortunes of India’s largest-ever contingent and rue how another Games had gone by without the national anthem being played and the tricolour hoisted only on two occasions. These ways of following the Olympics were not mutually exclusive, and any superficial analysis would leave Indian fans bemoaning a series of lost opportunities. In the shadow of Phelps and Bolt, against the looming visage of the US, Britain and China, what Indian athletes did appears puny and insignificant.
No matter how much emphasis sport places on medals and podium finishes, the Olympics were always meant to create an alternative definition of the word ‘winner’. Achievement was meant to be measured in relative terms—relative to yourself, to your surroundings, to where you came from, to what you had done before—and a more nuanced study of India’s Rio adventure throws up a series of extraordinary events that shine a silver lining to our 67th place on the medals table.
Rio was the first time in India’s Olympic journey that those who were only following our athletes had something to watch every day. Two shooters made the final in their events, and Beijing gold medallist Abhinav Bindra missed a bronze by one micron, or a thousandth of a millimetre. The Indian hockey team, undisputed kings of stickwork three-quarters of a century ago, reached the quarterfinals for the first time in 36 years. An Indian track athlete, Lalita Babar, made the final for the first time since P.T. Usha in Los Angeles in 1984. The tennis pair of Sania Mirza and Rohan Bopanna earned themselves a shot at a medal. Indian badminton, known as a one-woman sport till four years ago, discovered two new stars in Kidambi Srikanth, who lost a gruelling quarter-final to defending champion Lin Dan of China, and Pusarla Venkata Sindhu, who rattled and almost upset world number one Carolina Marin in the gold medal match to cement the ‘silver lining’ analogy. And, perhaps above all, a little-known 23-yearold from Tripura, not even five feet tall, announced herself to the gymnastics world by attempting and executing the dangerous two-and-half somersault Produnova vault to finish fourth in a highly technical discipline. Dipa Karmakar proved to a bemused audience in the gymnastics centre at Rio, and to millions of Indians who had stayed up half a world away, that our athletes can break through even in sports in which we have no tradition, no legacy and no expertise. She is the Jamaican bobsled team, which made it to the 1988 Calgary Olympics practising on snowless slopes, and Eddie ‘the Eagle’, the first British ski jumper to qualify for the same Winter Olympics, rolled into one.
All this may sound like sophistry to some, like we are clutching at straws, but if sport is about how you play the game, there were more than a few who played it admirably. That’s not to say there weren’t disappointments. More was expected from the archers, the boxers and the wrestlers, but a combination of injuries, tough draws and underwhelming performances in the heat of the moment, got India only one bronze—from the effervescent Sakshi Malik—from three sports in which we have a tradition of winning medals on the international stage.
No one feels the pain more than the athletes who put their lives on hold for four years to prepare for this moment, often without support from a broken, self-serving system that treats them as second-class citizens. While the Union minister for sports, Vijay Goel, was making headlines in Rio for trying to bully his way into accredited areas—even as marathon runner O.P. Jaisha was stranded without water— there has been no word, no statement of intent from our official sporting establishment that they will overhaul the existing structure or make it more efficient. Instead, it was left to the Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ), a non-profit organisation that has been working for the past decade to support elite athletes, and accounts for five of the last eight Olympic medals won by India, to take the blame on itself and pledge it would seek answers within. In a series of tweets on August 21, OGQ, while congratulating the athletes, said: “We feel that our efforts to help the athletes were not good enough and we need to introspect deeply .... We are very open to feedback and constructive criticism.”
While India may be far away from becoming a genuine sporting nation, the silver lining is that Indian sport is finally starting to express itself. That our athletes are taking matters into their own hands and expecting something of themselves. That they’re not happy being ‘Olympians’, they want to be champions. So let the rustle of the next few pages reveal what we have achieved and what needs to be done to convert the silver lining into a golden glow.