What The Olympics Teaches Us About India
That Olympic feeling is back as Paris gets set to host the mega sporting event after 100 years. Thank god for the return of carnival and crowds, missed in Tokyo due to the Coronavirus. We’re all set for the spectacle on the Seine, even those of us who have watched the Netflix film Under Paris where sharks attack swimmers.
In addition to being the best sporting treat in the world, the Games hold up a reflection of our strengths and flaws as a nation. The Olympics tells an Indian story of caste, religion, gender, north-south, urban-rural, briefly uniting with a singular goal and nowhere is this better highlighted than in the Indian men’s 4x400 relay team of two Muslims, one Christian and one Hindu athlete, mostly from Kerala, a state where interfaith values continue to be visible in the public domain.
The Games are also a time when it’s brought home to you that sporting success in this country is a story of training with bamboo javelins, landing on cattle feed while mastering the high jump and mortgaging your mother’s mangalsutra to buy a bow.
It’s a great time to learn about new places where sporting dreams thrive. Kothasahi in Odisha, Iklauta in Uttar Pradesh, Khosa Pando in Punjab, Amalapuram in Andhra Pradesh, Devargaon in Maharashtra and Nilamel in Kerala are all birthplaces of members of our Olympic team.
“I love that these Games are not your everyday sporting world of agents, deals, Ferraris and entitlement,” sports writer Rohit Brijnath wrote recently. “Here, as the unknown kayaker reaches her pinnacle, smaller sports feel the glow of a shared spotlight. In our daily lives our tastes get narrowed—football for you, tennis for me—but at a Games we see sport in all its magnificent vastness.”
With each edition, we revisit new sports. How many of you watched javelin throw before Tokyo when Neeraj Chopra won India's first track-and-field gold in that event? I began tracking wrestling when Sushil Kumar and Yogeshwar Dutt won medals at the London Olympics in 2012. My daughter was introduced to boxing thanks to Mary Kom’s victory that same year. This Olympics too will likely have many firsts.
Four previous Olympic medal winners—Mirabai Chanu, Neeraj Chopra, Lovlina Borgohain and PV Sindhu—will be competing again. But beyond the champions, the Olympics is the best way to catch up with all the lesser known stars of Indian sport and know their backstories. Usain Bolt fan and fastest Indian hurdler Jyothi Yarraji’s mother Kumari is a domestic worker and hospital cleaner, her father a security guard. Jaismine Lamboria, 22, is a boxer like her great grandfather Hawa Singh who won two gold medals at the Asian Games. Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty are former ‘enemies’ turned doubles badminton partners.
Many of our athletes have switched sports in their careers. Esha Singh, 18, daughter of a rally car driver, dabbled in badminton, tennis and skating before she embraced the air pistol. Kishore Jena, son of a paddy farmer, switched from volleyball to javelin because of his height. Tajinderpal Singh Tooor jumped from cricket to shot put because his father insisted he pick the same sport his uncle once had. The Olympics introduces us to many inspirational Indian parents who have supported their children no matter what. Like boxer Nikhat Zareen’s father who agreed with her that boxing didn’t just have to be for boys.
Journalists in Paris have front-row seats to this jamboree and I enjoy the stories they share nonchalantly about how archer Dhiraj Bommadevara admitted he was “confused and a bit scared when things weren’t going his way” (after a late surge, he ended fourth in the men’s rankings) or how they witnessed weightlifter Mirabai Chanu winning India’s first medal of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
“That was a tricky morning since the shooting and weightlifting events were around the same time and Saurabh Chaudhary (who was a sure shot medal contender) had just topped the qualifying round in the men’s 10m air pistol,” ESPN India journalist Shyam Vasudevan tweeted. Chanu, who had contemplated giving up the sport after her performance at Rio 2016 and the criticism that followed, was one of our biggest joys at Tokyo. Hey, I saw her too—on TV.
The number crunchers have a field day. With its eight gold, one silver, three bronze Olympic history, India is the most successful men’s hockey team in Paris. At 117 athletes (who will participate in 16 of 32 sports), it’s our second largest contingent ever, but smaller than New Zealand’s 195 athletes, a country with a population less than Ahmedabad. President of the Indian Olympic Association PT Usha has forecast a double digit medal tally, up from 7 in Tokyo. Everyone loves a little Olympic math.
The Olympics is also a time when the ugliness of Indian sport—and our abysmal doping record—becomes clearly visible. “I am a Korean coach who signed a contract to prepare (the Indian archers) for the Paris Olympics. But at a critical time, I was removed from the Olympic coaching role and my flight schedule told me to return home,” National Archery team coach Baek Woong Ki told PTI. Expect more controversies to unfurl before the Games are done. I’m rooting for wrestler Vinesh Phogat, who has fought a prolonged public battle with the sporting establishment this past year.
Most of all I love the Olympics because it’s a 19-day marathon of bonding with my 14-year-old daughter. It’s a chance to introduce her to aspects of our country she may not know enough about and to some of the world’s best stories about resilience and hope—many of them belonging to women.
PS: Most athletes are on Instagram posting updates of the Games. Pick your favourites and follow them.
Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.
