Opinion
Manu Joseph: India’s Olympic Games shame is not about sports at all
Summary
- Our relatively low medal tally is not as disgraceful as the fact that none of our cities can qualify to host the games. Could even Delhi make the cut? It tells us something about the liveability of Indian cities.
Every four years, the world organizes a great festival that leaves India slighted. And so it would be at the Paris Olympics. No other nation would suffer as we will. The Winter Olympics is not so embarrassing because India is perceived as a tropical country.
But at the summer edition, India will be exposed. We may win some medals, but they would be very few, and most of our embarrassments come when our achievements are measured against a population of over a billion. But India’s sporting mediocrity should not be what shames us. It’s something else.
In any case, Indians have devised a way to handle shame—it’s a relatively new form of expressing shame, which does not look like shame at all. It is a hysterical sense of pride at any Indian triumph. And so it will probably happen again as some Indians win some medals and the nation goes berserk.
Humans exempt emotions from analysis because if emotions are analysed, we would find it very hard to be emotional. If you look at what the country’s contribution is to the success of an Indian athlete, it would be even more embarrassing than our medal tally.
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India used to treat its finest athletes very poorly. In fact, during state-level tournaments, they used to be put up in parked railway coaches. Now there is some improvement in the training conditions of national-level athletes, but if you look at the lowest rungs of Indian sports, from where future athletes emerge, the conditions are horrible.
You ask any parent of any social class whose child has some kind of sporting talent in any of the Olympic disciplines, you will hear stories of how poorly competitions are organized, how filthy and unsafe the facilities are. Children are made to wait for hours in the sun as officials arrive late.
A few weeks ago, there were state-level under-15 swimming events in Gurgaon—in outdoor pools while temperatures soared to 45° Celsius. It takes only some humaneness and not even organizational competence to host such events in cooler months or build indoor pools. India is not so poor anymore, but it treats its citizens as though they are poor. It’s extraordinary that not many children die during such sporting events.
That is why I say that the very existence of Indian athletes of global calibre is not because of India, but in spite of India. The shirts of Indian athletes should not say ‘India’ but ‘Despite India.’ And the most thrilling aspect of Indian athletes who triumph at the Olympics is that they are so exceptional that despite everything India threw at them, they reached so far.
Members of the middle class usually opt out of this sporting torment and instead become consumers of national pride through the efforts of poorer people. Like they employ drivers and gardeners, they also employ the poor to overcome the realities of India and somehow triumph against other nations.
The Olympics is filled with farce. For instance, the amusing anthems of nations, which are usually mediocre hyperbolic songs written by poets close to the establishment that claim exactly what those nations are not. But the games do reveal a great truth—how undeserving India is of sporting glory. Even so, the lack of sporting prowess is not our real shame.
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The pride of most nations at the Olympics is misplaced. By one measure, the US and a few other Western countries have a hand in most of the medals won by other nations, including China. Because in most disciplines, serious athletes have a shot at excellence only if they are trained by ‘foreign’ coaches, which usually means Western coaches, using Western systems.
So the Olympics are in reality a triumph of the West and how the world has surrendered to a way of life where the West holds all the cards. The West partly finances its sporting excellence through its economic might, by becoming a beacon for legal and illegal migrants. How then can the Olympics medal tally be a measure of national pride?
What should credibly and convincingly shame India is that India is still not advanced enough to host the games. Now that is very relevant to our lives because hosting the Olympics is also a measure of how liveable the host city is.
The International Olympic Council has specific requirements—the host city should have about 40,000 hotel rooms of varying degrees of high quality, and high-quality roads and public transportation, and international-grade sporting venues. No Indian city qualifies, even though India has been making noises about bidding to host the Olympics. The only city that could come close is Delhi and even that seems like an outside chance.
The biggest sporting spectacle we hosted was the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010. Indian sports officials were accused of embezzling crores, the venues were not ready until very late, the chief executive of the games federation, Mike Hooper, said that the Games Village was filthy and unfit for humans.
An Indian games official defended the country by saying that Indians and the West had different hygiene standards. Also, the ceiling of a stadium collapsed. India spent billions of dollars to buy prestige but ended up exposing its true nature to the world.
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The fact is that no part of India qualifies to make a serious bid for the Olympics. It should be a reminder that we live in conditions that are among the worst in the world. The way India treats us, it is as though we are all athletes.
