No sport: Why our rewards system is just plain wrong

The only emotion that unites Indians beyond cricket is that quadrennial feeling of helplessness and anxiety about the country’s fortunes at the Summer Olympics. It’s a loop filled with familiar dread and much foreboding. This loop also has a texture of déja vu — typically, the contingent is larger than the previous one and is led by a marquee sportsperson who brings a sense of solitary achievement, followed by a peaking of efforts that still don’t have the aura of consistency athletes from competing countries, with fewer participants, bring home. We then start comparing ourselves with nations of smaller GDPs and rant on about why we can’t win some gold. A medal or two finally come but they become a victory lap that pampers the winners and shames the losers. There is no glory in competing and that continues to be the sad story of India at the Olympics.

The pattern of celebrations suggests a bias towards the winner-takes-all society that we now have. Instead of developing focused infrastructure towards building scores of athletes and sportspersons worthy of Olympic-scale achievements, we place priorities on rewarding the few and pushing the rest into dejection.

Look at the blitzkrieg of benefits announced to the trio of P.V. Sindhu, Sakshi Malik and Deepa Karmakar by various state governments. Agreed, their successes have brought us unimaginable joy but the bevy of tangible gifts and the noisy praise might actually lead us to ignore the real, big picture. This delirium we find ourselves in also discounts two aspects which need to be recognised by any nation aspiring for Olympic glory.

One, we have to reward the losers who still fought with equal ferocity. That includes the likes of Srikanth Kidambi who lost matches, but won hearts. If we have to celebrate successes, we need to remember the losses too because that’s the only way towards a consistent team. Badminton brought India the world’s attention because in 2004, we created an infrastructure capable of producing champions. But it remains a team sport and to dominate the game like the way the Indonesians, the Japanese and the Koreans do, we need more than one Sindhu. We need a collection of the finest — not just one name and that means acknowledging the efforts of Saina Nehwal and Kidambi. The wider the divide between sportspersons, lesser are our chances at the top 3. And it’s not just badminton — we need to start developing teams in gymnastics and wrestling too.

The second aspect we overlook while singling out sportsmen for massive rewards, is the need to build more consistent Olympic champs. Take a look at all the famous non-cricket sportspersons the country has created — P.T. Usha and Aswini Nachappa (athletics), Mary Kom (boxing), Abhinav Bindra (shooting), Sania Mirza (tennis), Yogeshwar Dutt (wrestling), Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (shooting) — and you’ll realise that some of them have bagged just one Olympic medal and have never been able to repeat their successes. Contrast that fact with what Michael Phelps did at Rio and the larger picture should get clearer. Of course, we have Leander Paes who appeared in seven Olympic Games but his last and only medal was in 1996, at Atlanta. Again, contrast that with what Andy Murray has been doing.

We have to train our sportsmen to hunt in packs, to form efficient partnerships and to be part of a system where every individual gets the best shot at glory.

As of now, though, something is still not right in the way India coronates its Olympic winners as if they were “lifetime achievements”.