Olympics Tamil News: After the conclusion of the fourth Olympic Games in London in 1908, the magazine “Tianjin Youth” raised three questions. As reported by Reuters 14 years ago, they are:
- When will China send a winning athlete to the Olympics?
- When will China send the winning team to the Olympics?
- When will China invite world teams to Beijing (now Beijing) for the International Olympic Games instead of Athens?
It was a hundred years after these questions were raised that China invited world teams to Beijing. There it hosted one of the biggest Olympic Games.
In the context of India, the third question is felt to be reminiscent. This week, talks about which country to host the Olympics are gaining momentum.
If there were any doubts about Gujarat’s seriousness about hosting the Olympics in 2036, two recent developments should put them to rest.
First, the National Games, which concluded this month, were held in Gujarat. While there was no subtlety in the messaging, in their official communication, luminaries like organizers Geet Sethi and Pullela Gopichand said the national games were the ‘first step towards Olympic ambitions’.
Then, last Thursday, the Associated Press reported that it was not a one-way street, with only Gujarat expressing interest. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is currently in talks with 10 potential countries to host future Summer Games, the news agency said. Among them, India is included.
This event is the furthest India has come to fulfill its dream of hosting the Olympics. The IOC update comes days after the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) announced that India and Saudi Arabia are in the running to host the 2027 Asian Cup. India is hosting the global age-group tournament for the second time in five years, in the midst of hosting the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup.
All this gives the impression that India is shaping up to be the next big hub. But at this point, it is important to take a step back and ask whether India should be a sports-playing country or a sports-hosting country.
There are good reasons for India to host these major events – the primary one being the huge amount of interest and the potential financial boost that the Olympic Games can get.
However, there are good reasons not to host them. The inevitable delays and consequent inflated budget burdens the taxpayers. Being competitive and having the ability to fight for medals is the main argument against hosting big events.
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Ahead of the 2017 Men’s U-17 World Cup, then All India Football Federation (AIFF) president Prabul Patel had promised that the tournament would change the face of Indian football. Similar claims were made ahead of the ongoing Women’s U-17 World Cup.
On both occasions, school-going youngsters were left out to dry for the vanity of a few, India losing all the matches they played and finishing last among the participating teams. It is still unclear what the Patel-led administration intended to achieve, as their ‘vision’ of creating an ecosystem has failed miserably.
The state of Indian football is as bad as ever.
Last week, the country crashed out of the qualifying round of the U-20 AFC Championship, which was previously the U-19 tournament. It extended India’s dubious run of not qualifying for the tournament to 18 years, except when they hosted the tournament once in 2006.
Over the past decade, there have been over two dozen opportunities to compete in Asian and World age-group competitions, U-16/U-17 and U-19/U-20 Asian and World Cups and U- 23 Asia Cup. India participated in four matches at the 2017 U-17 World Cup.
If one focuses less on outcomes and more on technical skills at age levels, the results are encouraging. An analysis of India’s matches in the matches they have contested shows that in almost every parameter, from possession to completion of passes and attempts at goal, the team lags behind the opposition: they are unable to hold the ball, cross or create goal-scoring opportunities.
Struggles at the U-19 and U-23 levels have seen India repeatedly fail to qualify for the continental championships, as performances at those levels are often indicators of senior team success.
This means that there is some sort of structure in men’s football, however lacking. The fact that the AIFF has completely ignored the women’s game for decades and then suddenly asked them to play against the best team in the world underlines their confused attitude.
Now, AIFF wants to host the Senior Asia Cup in 2027.
The reasons for holding this competition are not clear. If demand is to be reduced, India does not need to host a competition; Packed stands at domestic matches show enough appetite for the game. If the hope is that it will ignite bottom-up development, there are examples of how bad the top-down approach is.
Unlike the Patel-led administration, it is important for new chairman Kalyan Chaubey to realize that hosting major events is not a shortcut to success; It is an illusory path.
There is also a lesson in this for the Olympic organization: running before learning to walk has consequences. Because the situation in many Olympic disciplines is very bad.
Since the 2000 Olympics, the country has not sent nearly half of its athletes since the 2000 Olympics. At the Sydney Games, India participated in only 13 out of 28 games. In Tokyo, the country’s athletes qualified in 18 of the 33 sports, competing in only 69 of the 339 medal events.
This has a direct impact on where a country ranks in the medal table.
Except for Mexico in 1968, which won medals in double digits in every edition of the tournament, and Canada in 1976, every host has at least one gold medal. Since the turn of the century, the minimum number of gold medals won by a host country – six, Greece – is still more than India has won in the same period.
In fact, as is the trend for domestic athletes leading to more medals, expect a huge amount of funding. However, India has a lot going for it to break into the top 15 in the medal table for every host country since 2000.
As of now, there is no coherent strategy on the part of administrators to tackle these issues. Instead, India is racing against time to save itself from a second IOC suspension in a decade.
It is not clear what India hopes to achieve by hosting the Olympics. For China, author Mark Treyer, in his book Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to be the Best, notes that sport is a ‘political priority’.
“Since the Games were awarded to Beijing in 2001, sports became a top political priority, as the Olympics were a vehicle to achieve a single political goal – presenting the face of a new, modernized China to the world. The government saw this opportunity and grabbed it with both hands,” Dreyer wrote.
If India’s mission is purely sporting, it must begin by nurturing young talent, before getting down to something as basic as scouting and auditions, as the Tianjin Youth Magazine asked its readers in 1908:
- When will India send the winning athlete to the Olympics?
- When will India send the winning team to the Olympics?
So, the Olympics can wait.
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