Journey to a nation in game

The best way to start an unbiased assessment of the sports odyssey of independent India in 75 years is to turn our backs today. Or at least 2022. From the July promo Commonwealth Games, flag-waving, rapid cuts of random athletes doing sporty things, and a scintillating montage of Sports Minister Anurag Thakur purposefully running around before delivering his piece to the camera. They contain many contradictory narratives – the Commonwealth identity created by the Empire, the state of our sport – and end up only blurring objectivity.

left on the back burner

Navigating through Indian sport over the past 75 years has involved not only navigating a convoy of champions. Our sport is rooted in our political, economic and social history. The sporting nation of India also developed in the last two decades of the 20th century, with the slow transformation of the sport from the amateurishness of the post-war era to the professionalism.

India played a key role in building colonial, pan-Asian athletic solidarity when it hosted the Asian Games for the first time. Starting in 1951 with 11 countries, 489 athletes and 57 medal events in six sports, the Asian Games have grown into the second largest multi-sport event in the world.

But as a young country with myriad constraints and priorities, the Indian game was mostly left on the back-burner. Its funding was limited, mostly dependent and driven by royal patronage, by trading houses such as Patiala or Tatas and later Mahindras, and governed by pre-independence administrators of the urban elite. After a few decades of success in the team sport – exceptional Olympic hockey dominance and continued competitiveness in continental football – the Indian sport has been blindfolded since the mid-1970s, keeping pace with the changing world. Here, we only mention the Olympic Games. In non-Olympic disciplines, Indians made their mark in cue sports, tennis and badminton.

And through a sudden series of circumstances, India’s 1983 World Cup victory, the Indian cricket team became the sport that broke away from the pack, charting an evolutionary course that led to its slow-moving pace. Very different from cousins. The advent of satellite TV following the popularity of the 50-over game and the opening up of Indian markets in the 1990s became the perfect storm for cricket. If 1983 was Year Zero, by 2000 cricket had spread to the hinterland, dominating both the mind space and the markets.

kingdom in our games

The state’s support was to keep other Indian sports alive, regardless of international results. First, as the state linked sporting performance with public sector employment, sport became a source of livelihood, not a leisure. The government also funded, through our taxes, the federations in charge of running about 33 ‘priority’ sports. Most of these, along with powerful, politically aligned leadership, rode the gravy train for decades, with many refusing to adopt international sports governance practices to date.

staged 1982 Asian Games And the 2010 Commonwealth Games helped create new infrastructure and a pan-India network of over 100 training centers across five categories through the Sports Authority of India. Centers still draw and remain suppliers to most of our talent pool. But to date, Indian athletes have fewer opportunities for sustained, seasonal competition than their compatriots abroad in a large number of sports disciplines. While the Khelo India scheme was intended to address the shortfall, an objective evaluation of the program is still awaited. Wherever an organized grassroots program and an annual calendar exist in the district, state and nation, that sport does not require its athletes to spend most months of the year in training camps away from home. In India, such states make up a small percentage.

The economic opportunism of cricket should have taught other disciplines to develop and seek stability and independence. Instead, cricket’s success was simply answered with outrage. Results started showing. In 1990, India finished 11th in the medal tally at the Beijing Asian Games, for the first time outside the top 10 with the lone gold in kabaddi. While India won Olympic gold in men’s hockey in 1980, it was only 16 years later that it won its next medal, with Leander Paes winning the bronze in 1996. Indian got away from hockey, football and tennis in the last two decades. And athletics’ failure to get a star after PT Usha or cash in on Anju Bobby George’s World Championship medals are governance failures. The return and rise of badminton was driven not by its governing body, but by the individual efforts of the sport’s greats.

the tide turns with the millennium

The Indian athlete, however, is not easily crushed. At the turn of the century, the ambitious found support and real-time investment. The game’s road to success, it was clear, was not tied to divine intervention or magic genes, but to systematic planning, timely expert assistance, and securing government funding. The first decade of the 21st century was also to mark the creation of institutions, unique only to Indian sport, evidence of administrative laziness. Private bodies acted as intermediaries between the aspiring athlete and the official gatekeepers and/or government red tape to ensure funding, training and competition planning were carried out quickly. Since the early 2000s, Olympic Gold Quest (2001), Mittal Champions Trust (2003, now defunct), GoSports Foundation (2008, the first to support Para Sports), Lakshya Sports (2009), Anglian Medal Hunt (2012) and JSW Sport (2013) appeared on the scene and their impact is visible in the results.

In 2008, rifle shooter Abhinav Bindra won India’s first individual Olympic gold in Beijing. India also won bronze medals in boxing and wrestling. This was its first multi-medal Olympics since 1952 Helsinki. The praise by these private sports bodies was meant to prick other stakeholders. Some federations such as wrestling today are trying to prevent their athletes from signing up with private bodies. The government, which is still the largest funding pool for the Games, created its own funding and training program for elite athletes – the Target Olympic Podium Scheme – in 2014. Bindra had a golden age era, but it took almost 13 years for India’s second gold from Neeraj Chopra. ,

The year 2008 also marked a tectonic change in cricket when the world’s first Twenty20 franchise competition, the Indian Premier League (IPL), began. It has since rocked global cricket and its economy.

Seventy-five years have given Indian sport a lot to ponder over. New industry leaders such as JSW and Reliance are investing large chunks of Corporate Social Responsibility funds in running privately funded world-class training institutes, centers of excellence and sport-specific programs. In cricket, India, armed with a battery of fast bowlers, has become a successful touring side across all formats but interestingly, it has not won a major ICC title for nearly a decade. IPL is on the verge of challenging and consuming the international calendar.

If 75 has brought us here, where will the next 25 years take us? To begin with, Indian cricket should distribute its gravy far more evenly than at the top of the table. Perhaps at 75, India is another thorn in the path of our sports development. It may be time to break away from the medal-buying frenzy and give children greater access to sports and competition in a safe environment.

In any case, the 1970s and 1980s around our Olympic sport are blindfolded and the uber elite athlete has been served far better into the new millennium than their predecessors. Bindra says that when it comes to cash prizes, no athlete in the world is rewarded better than Indians. What remains to be topped up is governance, the use of advanced sports science, and the prioritization of performance-enabled environments, “still a work in progress.”

The fusion of sporting performance has also emerged in every stream of hypernationalism. People who give buckets of cash always demand higher returns. Indian sports star should become social media supporter of state policy. The star athlete also signs up as a cheerleader. Even in this best of times for sports lovers, comes a serious counter to the endless flag-waving jingoism that plagues our sport today. A documentary released last year called Tangho (Punjabi for ‘longing’) Among many things, the hockey team depicts the story of refugee players from Lahore, which won India’s first Olympic gold in London in 1948. After a screening in Bengaluru, director Bani Singh, double’s daughter Olympic gold medalist Nandi Singh was asked about the use of 1948 footage of the Indian flag and the national anthem. Tangho and its interpretation in contemporary India. He reminded us that for the 1948 team, which developed as subjects under colonial rule, seeing the flag go up over the Union Jack was “not linguism, it was gloom, it was love.” Like the anthem, “I think we need to reclaim these symbols the way we understand them… Not to say, the flag belongs to all of us. I wanted to make it look like it was 1948 I was there for them.”

For all the promises of a better game tomorrow, our past at 75 reminds India of how precious that was and should not be forgotten.

It may be time to break away from the medal-buying craze and give children greater access to sports and competition in a safe environment.

Sharda Ugra has been a sports journalist for more than three decades