American investing $120M to train Indians for Olympics

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Finance millionaire and Indophile Andrew Krieger is investing $120M in a Hyderabad sports training center to boost India’s Olympics results:

As India awaits glory in Athens, its star athlete, markswoman Anjali Bhagwat, is peeved that she had to pay for a coach on her own… Krieger, who studied Hindu philosophy, is pouring $120 million into a planned sports facility in the Indian tech hub of Hyderabad, where international coaches will groom future champions in all sports. It will be a replica of IMG Academies, a coaching center in Bradenton, Fla., that has produced the likes of tennis champ Maria Sharapova.

It’s just shameful that it’s not an Indian investor doing this. Indian marksman Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, a major in the Indian army, won India’s sole medal, and its first ever individual silver medal, in double trap shooting last week. There are many ways to slice India’s medal drought, all of them wince-worthy:

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  • Second-gen desi Mohini Bhardwaj, competing for the U.S., has singlehandedly equaled India’s Athens medal haul. She’s hitching a ride on the U.S. economy, just like desi immigrants in technology and medicine do.

  • American swimmer Michael Phelps’ medal haul is already 7x that of a country with a billion people.

  • India’s medal haul at Athens ranks it next to such powerful nations as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, and Trinidad.

  • India’s only had three individual gold medals ever and just 13 team medals, mostly in field hockey. Its all-time medal count is less than the number its rival China wins at every Olympic Games.

  • Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi dropped a marathon 4-hour set, 16-14, to Croatia and settled for fourth place in doubles tennis.

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    div>Star markswoman Anjali Bhagwat was cut early. The archers didn’t make it into finals. The women weightlifters failed drug tests. The only Indian athlete remaining who’s expected to have a medal shot is long jumper Anju Bobby George.

    • Unfortunately, unless Indian sports investment increases, we’ll probably read some variation of this story every four years, just as we did four years ago:

    The eternal flame’s five-week trip was meant to ignite worldwide sporting passion… But once the relay started, a look at the torchbearers revealed a surprise… India had chosen Bollywood stars and cricketers as the guardians of sports’ supreme icon… Does India, nation of a billion, really have no sports stars? It’s not that India lacks… national pride: the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center’s 2003 Global Attitudes survey found India was the most nationalistic place on earth, with 74% of respondents “completely agreeing” that Indian culture is superior.

    And this one (thanks, Rana):

    Novelist and cultural commentator Shashi Tharoor says people in the country have grown used to looking down to the bottom of the list of medal-winning countries searching for India. “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 and Indian athletes are barely mentioned among the also-rans.”