Indian’s at the Global Stage

Uday Narayan Goel
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read
Neeraj Chopra, 20 years old winning Gold Medal in Javelin Throw at Asian Games 2018 Image: http://www.newindianexpress.com/sport/asian-games/news/2018/aug/27/neeraj-chopra-wins-first-ever-javelin-throw-gold-for-india-at-asian-games-1863531.html

Hi Everyone

This is my first blog and I couldn’t find a better way to start off. The Asian Games have just been concluded in Jakarta and India has put up its best ever performance in any Asiad’s held outside India. A jaw dropping 69 medals coming from a vast multitude of sports , some sports whose name even I hadn’t heard of. But how does it connect with the agenda “Indian at the world stage” ?. We have made a lot of progress in a variety of fields. Indians are everywhere today in world. Beyond STEM, we are in art, dance, popular culture, business and finance. We have even reached the space leaving quite a many behind. In many sectors like Information Technology, we are even ahead of some of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world. Big nations respect us, neighbours see a helping hand in us in times of need and the world lauds our nuclear programmes. We have given the world Yoga and Ayurveda and taught the world, importance of a healthy and peaceful mind. Yes, we are almost everywhere. Why do I say almost everywhere is because we are catching up the rest of the world in the race to be good at sports.

In this blog, I’m going to highlight how we have lagged behind in the area of sports. In my future blogs, I intend to show how we are improvising, but for this one one, I’’ll restrict myself to the challenges we have faced thus far.

Sports in India has been synonymous to cricket for quite some time now. We have forgotten the fact that our national sport is Hockey. Lets dive 10 years down the line and see what has happened in our country. With the introduction of the I.P.L. in 2008, cricket in India has been able to attract large money, sponsorship’s, limelight for players, and extract players from smaller towns and cities. But what about hockey? And what about other sports ? This concept has been introduced in other sports as well and has showed good results. We have seen the introduction of Hockey India League for hockey and Indian Super League for football. These initiatives have led to an increasing viewership and outreach, as well as improvised the standards of our national teams. Today Indian hockey team is one of the top 5 teams in the world, and for the first time Indian football team has been ranked below 100. Such kinds of initiatives are coming up in other sports as well but are still not up to that level.

To understand the history of Indian sports, lets look back at India’s performance at the Olympics ever since it’s first participation in 1900. India won it’s first Olympic medal in 1900 with Norman Pritchard wining 2 silver medals in athletics. Though he was a British Indian. India till date has won just 28 medals in Olympics. The number might be small, on deeper analysis, we see why it should be a big reason to worry. Out of these 28 medals, 11 medals have been won in hockey(men’s) between 1928 and 1980 and we haven’t won a single medal in hockey since then, yet we call it as our national sport. We had a dry run in 3 Olympics before we again started winning medals. We had to wait for 108 years to get our first individual gold, a gold in shooting. And since 2008, we have won 11 medals. Michael Phelps, the noted swimmer has more medals than India.

India is a big country to manage. In a jungle of big issues, Sports is always subdued. There are always issues of funds and and shortage of opportunities in several sports. And all sports ultimately lead to a govt. job. Most of the athlete in India join sports with the soul aim of securing jobs in railways and armed forces. A majority of our athletes and shooters belong to the Indian army. Then comes caste divisions and gender division. Until recently, women wrestling was not so popular. Wrestling being largely localised to Haryana, majority of our wrestlers come from Harayana. But then there is also the problem of deteriorating gender ratio and issues of gender bias. Many sports in India are localised to certain regions, many to certain communities. Many stars become victim of corruption and abuse.

But I feel that this country has never had shortage of athletes. Not surely of enthusiastic athletes, who may not be best at their discipline but surely given the fire inside their bodies, and provided they are given a just opportunity, they are ready to perform, improve and outclass others. We Indian’s are no short than anybody else, and these Asian Games are perfect example of that. Many women have won medals, we have left a mark on many discipline’s some where we didn’t even existed and won medals in many of them. But what was more important was that athletes broke their own records. This is what sportsmanship is all about. This is what an athlete aspires, competing against himself, and bringing glory to the nation. This teaches us a very important lesson :

“Never to loose hope and Keep fighting till you improvise and achieve your Goal, everyday, every hour, every second”