12. Good Sports, Bad Sports
WAR, CLAUSEWITZ FAMOUSLY SAID, is nothing but the continuation of state policy by other means. All international sport is, in turn, nothing but an exercise in national chauvinism by other means. At some level we all pretend to tune in to the Olympics to admire human athleticism at its finest, but none of us can deny the special significance of the flags under which those athletes first enter the stadium, the anthem that is played when the winner mounts the podium — and, ultimately, that impossible-to-ignore, regularly updated medal tally, listing the gold, silver, and bronze awarded to each participating country, which makes up the Games’ real honor roll.
Every Indian who follows the Olympics has known the cringe-making experience of scanning that list, the eyes traveling down past dozens of nations big and small before alighting on a solitary tennis or wrestling bronze that gives India, with its billion-strong population, its modest place on the tally. Even worse, we have all known the shame of waiting day after day for India to appear on the list at all, as countries, a hundredth our size, record gold upon gold while Indian athletes are barely mentioned among the also-rans. The experience has always brought chagrin. Indians like to think we can hold our own against the best in the world in any field: our Kalidasa can stand up to their Shakespeare, our Ramanujan to their Einstein, our Rukmini Devi to their Margot Fonteyn, our K3G to their Titanic and, these days, our Infosys to their Microsoft. In sport, however, it has been a different story. Our cricketers have twice (in 1971 and 1983) come close to being considered the best in the world, and though they seemed to be flirting with greatness again in 2003–4, they have fallen away again in 2007, eliminated humiliatingly with the minnows from the World Cup. Prakash Padukone in badminton and Vishwanathan Anand in chess almost, but not quite, attained the status of undisputed world champions. But that is all. In the Olympics, that domain of traditional sporting excellence since 776 B.C., our country's record has actually declined. The one gold medal we had become used to winning since the 1920s, in hockey, has proved elusive in recent Games, as our players have stumbled on Astroturf. In everything where simple human prowess is at stake — running, jumping, swimming, lifting, throwing — Indians simply don't count.
Poor Madhu Sapre was unjustly denied a Miss World title in the early 1990s because of her answer to the question, “What is the first thing you would do if you became the ruler of your country?” Her response—“I would build a sports stadium”—was considered dumb by the judges, and the almost-certain crown (she was the overwhelming favorite of the bookies) slipped from her grasp. Sapre's answer might not have been the brightest, but if the judges had any idea of how desperate Indians are for sporting success, they would have understood that it was not such an absurd priority for her to express after all.
Why is it that we do so badly? The explanations have ranged from the anthropological to the borderline racist. (Indians don't have the genes, the build, the stamina, the climate, whatever.) There are structural explanations and infrastructural ones: lack of training facilities, gymnasiums, running tracks, equipment, financial resources. We are a developing country, it is said; but other developing countries, from Jamaica to Ethiopia, regularly rake in the medals. Our talent pool isn't really a billion, some argue; it's only the well-off and middle class, maybe 300 million strong, who can afford to play sports. But even that is a larger population base than a hundred countries that do better than us at the Olympics. Yet, it is true that the incentives for success are not great; the years of sacrifice and effort it takes to become a world-class athlete are simply not a realistic option to an Indian who needs to make a living, and sponsors are few and far between.
And then there's the usual Indian problem: sports administrative bodies and government departments are ridden with patronage and petty bossism, with officials more interested in protecting their turf than in promoting athletes. With all these factors, failure in the Olympics, it is suggested, is encoded in our national DNA.
And yet success or failure still depends on the individual athlete. Indian genes in a developing country did not prevent a Vijay Singh emerging from Fiji to rival Tiger Woods as the best golfer in the world. And if Indians can be better than Caucasians and Caribbeans on the cricket field, why can't they beat them in the Olympic stadium? My family's former domestic retainer, Dulal Chandra Dev, as passionate a sports fan as ever lived, had a typically Bengali-leftist analysis of the national predicament. The problem, he averred, was that we were drawing on a limited pool of effete city-bred athletes who were knowledgeable enough about a sport to try to take it up. What we needed to do, he asserted, was to go into the tribal areas, where people had never heard of the marathon or the javelin throw and had no idea what “Olympics” or even “Games” meant. Yet there we would find Santhals and Bhils who practiced these Olympic skills from birth in their daily lives. What's a 26-kilometer run, Dulal argued, to a tribal who runs twice that distance every day just to fetch water or wood? Archery and javelin throwing would be child's play to an aboriginal who hunts with bows and arrows and spears every day just to be able to eat.
It's a thought, and I am sure Dulal would be happy if the sports ministry took him up on it and sent talent scouts to Jharkhand immediately.
But I somehow doubt that the solution is quite that simple. It is one thing to have the skill, quite another to be able to use it in competition. The point about the Olympics is that you are measured against the world's best: it is not just your eye against his, your legs against hers, but what you can do against their trainer, their running shoe, their ergodynamic costume, their titanium archer's bow. And against that entire panoply of requirements, we seem chronically to fall short.
It doesn't have to be so. The newly globalized India of Wipro and Sania Mirza can find both the strength and the resources to compete. Some have seen in the embarrassment of our Olympic failures a metaphor of national decline. I am not so pessimistic myself. First of all, it was not as if India ever stood at the Olympian heights — we have no recorded history of global sporting accomplishment ever, so if we are starting at square one, it is not because we have fallen from square ninety-nine. Second, India always calls for more complex metaphors than most places, and ours is a country where a narrative of decline is never a sufficient explanation. In The Great Indian Novel I wrote that India was not a developing country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. Such comments are the privilege of the satirist, but it is probably true to acknowledge that ours is a country where things are always getting both better and worse at the same time. That is also true in the sporting arena: we may not retain medals we have won in the past, but might gain ones in fields (boxing? weight lifting?) where Indian youngsters have acquired skills we always thought they lacked.
And then there is the final intangible, the vital ingredient of all sporting success, as important as skill, training, equipment, and discipline: heart. There is no national quota for the will to win, the determination to strive beyond oneself for the glory of the country. It is the quality that led Leander Paes, never a serious contender in any other singles tournament that ever mattered, to belie his ranking and battle his way to a bronze medal in tennis at the 1996 Olympics. He played above himself because he wanted that medal, and he wanted to stand on that podium and have “ Jana Gana Mana” played before 300 million telespectators. That desire has to come from within, but it costs nothing. The next Paes might be an archer, a swimmer, a wrestler. It might even (if he and Mahesh Bhupathi can put their differences aside to combine for the sake of the country) be Paes himself.