I’ve known for a while that India does poorly in the Olympics, but I had never realized exactly how poorly:
The world’s second most populous nation … ranks dead last worldwide in the number of Olympic medals won per capita. Paraguay, Niger and Iraq have done better. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3266″>This statistic seems to only count countries that have won at least one medal, which leaves India better off than countries without medals, but that’s slim consolation.
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p designtimesp=”3268″>Now it may be unfair to compare medals on a per capita basis since that pits India against countries much smaller in population size and Olympic winnings are hard to scale up. However, even if you look at the two largest countries in the world, China has won over 100 times as many medals as India in the past few decades:
Since 1984, when China rejoined the Olympic Games after decades of isolation, the Asian superpower has won 320 medals. India, its political and economic rival, has won three… [Link]And in a century of Olympics, India has won just 16 medals (fewer than that other nation of a billion, China, typically wins at a single [sic] Games) and only eight in the last 50 years. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3277″>But, you object, China has a communist-era olympic medal factory which even tries to breed athletes. Fair enough, but even amongst Commonwealth countries in general, India lags so far behind that the officials of the Commonwealth Games have scolded India for not doing enough to avoid embarrassment when it next hosts the games in 2010 [Link]. No matter how you cut it, India is at the bottom of sporting countries worldwide.
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p designtimesp=”3281″>It is true that India does better in some sports than in others, but India’s best sports all require little physical exertion:
“India is doing very well in chess. And pretty well at cue sports like billiards and snooker. And for the past couple of years, Indian golfers have done very well on the Asian circuit…” [Link]
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p>The fact is that the Indian government has (perhaps rightly) never invested in sports, and what they spend has a low ROI:
“There are a lot of other priorities, like education and electricity,” said Indian Olympic Association Secretary General Randhir Singh. India does funnel a respectable amount of money toward its sports federations… [but] India’s sports centers spend much of their budget on salaries for bureaucrats, while athletes complain about lack of money for track improvements, coaches and better running shoes. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3290″>And market incentives are entirely oriented towards producing cricket stars, so sports with few viewers languish:
But perhaps the biggest reason India can’t achieve Olympic fame is cricket… Over the years, it has become India’s only important sport. As a result, a huge share of corporate sponsorship money goes to the cricket stars, and every athletically minded kid dreams of being one of them. In India’s villages, few kids play soccer or run races. Instead they play cricket. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3294″>Outside of cricket, things are pretty much teh suck:
The painful truth is India is rubbish at pretty much every other game. It has no football team worthy of the name, ranking 142nd in the world, behind the Maldives (paradise-island nation, pop. 339,330). Its rugby squad lost 78-3 in a recent match in England, to Pershore (pleasant market town, pop. 7,304). [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3298″>Culture also plays a role – Pakistan and Sri Lanka also do poorly in the Olympics and poor Bangladesh has yet to pick up a single medal. And again, without much of a market for domestic sports aside from cricket, parents have no incentive to push their children the way parents in America do:
“In India, parents do not encourage their children to play games. That’s a big handicap,” the Olympic Association’s Singh said. “But if there’s no money in sport, no parent wants his child to waste his time…” [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3302″>Lastly, consider the graph at the bottom of the post which shows that Indian men are the most virginal in the world [via Manish]. In America every young man knows that scoring on the field will help him score off it. There’s a reason why most sports involve getting a ball in a net / goal past a tenacious defender and you don’t need to be Freud to see it.
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p designtimesp=”3305″>But in India, where the average male loses his virginity at 19, incentives are different. Doing well at field hockey wont help you win the heart of fair maiden, but getting into engineering school might help you marry a cuter (less homely) girl when it comes time for your marriage to be deranged.
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p designtimesp=”3306″>So here’s my question — Is there is a way to increase India’s medal booty, and should India even try?
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p designtimesp=”3309″>After all, India is 10th in the world in world records, and has a very healthy sense of national self esteem:
the “2003 Global Attitudes survey found India was the most nationalistic place on earth, with 74% of respondents ‘completely agreeing’ that Indian culture is superior. “[cite].
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p designtimesp=”3315″>India excels in plenty of areas, like patents filed, fastest 10 miles skipped, and number of men singing and dancing on screen while wearing fugly costumes. Should we even try to second-guess India’s priorities?
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p>Related posts: American investing $120M to train Indians for Olympics, If not Torino, then where? and Desi athletes take the gold.
The first Indian international superstar sporting hero will be from the diaspora. Had I been born 40 years ago, I would have put my money on the sporting hero coming from the UK. So far, the UK has been complete bollocks. What? Harpal Singh? Oooooh, scary. He couldn’t even make it in England and is playing Ireland. Monty Panesar? Oooooh,
lawn bowlingcricket, how rare. Michael Chopra? He’s half, looks Italian but I support him. Kinda. He’s like a trendy, watered-down dosa made by Seattle-born chef. It’s still a dosa, but lacks spark.I looked to Canada for maybe a solitary ice hockey player and found none. The diaspora in Canada is a waste. They don’t even have an IT sector to blame for diverting kids from sports.
So that leaves us in the US. We have to build the Indian sporting hero for international worship. I will sire one at the very least. Red Snapper will have a go to qualify a proper Brit. A few other forward looking Mutineers are on board I’m sure.
Also, we need an enemy. Pakistan is a sissy sporting nation. We need a real enemy, one who will give us an eternal chip on our shoulder. One who, when we meet, regardless of venue, will be the favorite and India the underdog. A nation that will fuel India’s ire. A people that make us want to beat them in every sport that is not ping pong and pen twirling. A country that will give us nightmares, a country that has a historical presence in our consciousness, a country that is easily hateable. I elect China.
in the sense that, for instance, I myself and some other people who had more than a passing interest in sports (and even with parents who were as ambitious about success – both in sports and acads – as say, any avg american parent) simply fizzed out at the 14-15 yr point because it was unlikely we were going to be a big deal anyway. (Of course, the point is this is exactly what happens to 99.9999999999% of all aspiring kids in any place on earth with that rare remaining 0.00..001% eventually becoming the world champs) Even otherwise, college admissions in India do have things like sports quota (i know for certain the engg and medical entrances in AP do, though the iits don’t). And I also know some reasonably good people who practiced and played very seriously for a large part of their childhood to ultimately get that certificate of having played at the state or national level which essentially makes them eligible for the sports quota reservation in the engineering admissions. In fact, most people I know who played seriously did it with that intention, and I didnt encounter anyone with this goal of becoming a world champion or anything. But if any of these people really did fancy their abilities to reach greater heights, I am 100% positive that they would have gone all out for it.
Above were comments by Sakshi.
Sakshi, they are sports scholarships, like in Delhi U., etc. – very, very few with almost no support structure, but not in IITs, IIMs. At IIM interview, your past sports will help, but then a world class athlete is not going there.
Some of the American athletes and sportsperson here who are Olympians, and world beaters, but also have medical, and law degrees from Ivy League, and all. They get a leg up, in admission process.
The aussies invented calculator cricket. I like book version it is simpler.
An Australian game I played before is known as calculator cricket. You keep pressing the random number button. If you get any number above 0.2 you take the first number after the decimal point and add it to your total. If you get below that you’re out. Since you get a limited number of batters in cricket, if you get 10 outs you’re done. Whoever has the highest total wins.
But I do agree that the middle class is less focused on sports than would be the case elsewhere in the world. However, there are residential government schools called “sports schools”. Their selection process is fairly rigorous and over multiple levels: zonal level then district level, followed by state level. And they test in a wide range of physical abilities with points assigned for various categories ranging from height, weight, 100m timing, 800 m timing, how far you can throw a basket ball seated in this weird position that I can’t describe from my vague memory, long jump, high jump, etc. etc…
And it seemed to me like these schools were mostly filled with kids from very poor backgrounds or tribal areas and whose parents are generous enough to let them go to a (sports!) school. Very few middle class people even consider such a thing seriously. (I went all the way to the state level selections on campus in hakimpet in my 6th grade and made it to the list. My dad wanted me to join it, but I chickened out at the prospect of living in a residential school). However, not too many middle class people would consider such things too seriously. But my point is that, if indeed a truly world class athlete(who is well fed, etc. and is perfect in other ways) existed in the environment, I doubt that simple pressure from parents to concentrate on acads would really stifle his/her “olympic talent” completely (even assuming parents are completely oblivious to the kid’s potential talent)
random, a lot of new generation of cricketers from India are product of Chappell (Both run by Ian and Greg) school. I think quite a few Indian youngsters were selected, and they trained in Australia. That is the reason new crop of cricketers are more diverse, as opposed in past, when half of the team would be from Bombay and Delhi where there was enough infrastructure.
interestingly, milka singh’s son is top golfer from india in asian cricuit
i hate work. but just to add. manny malhotra and robin bawa are two players partially of indian descent who are playing and had played in the nhl. And i think that visanthe shiancoe might be like 1/11th indian (he’s a wr on the vikings) though he might be feather not dot.
i guess you could count Dhorasoo too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikash_Dhorasoo
though i guess this is entering into nasser hussain/freddie mercury territory in terms of claiming they’re indian
A personal viewpoint:
India does perform badly at the Olympics. But to put things in perspective, India has also performed badly in math and science. India has exactly zero Fields Medal winners out of nearly 50, and only 6 Nobel Laureates so far in all fields combined (including Mother Teresa) out of a few hundred. For all its emphasis on education, India routinely gets beaten at the International Mathematics Olympiad, the International Olympiad in Informatics, the ACM ICPC, and most of the International Science Olympiads.
My personal take on this is that India as a whole does not emphasize superlative performance when adequate performance has been achieved, not just in sports but in any field. When the objective is goal-seeking instead of optimization, any performance in excess of the requirements is a waste of effort. If the US phrase is “as American as apple pie”, and the Canadian phrase is “as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances“, the Indian equivalent must be “as Indian as required, but no more”.
But that does not preclude individual achievement in any field. Also, judging from the general success of the IIT/IIM alumni worldwide, India is probably pretty good at applying technical skills to specific problems, and finding new problem areas to solve. We may not rise to the rarefied heights of pure math associated with Fields medals, but we can apply some equally esoteric math to mundane problems reasonably well. We may not do groundbreaking research in fundamental science to win Nobels (at least not often enough to make it a habit), but we can apply someone else’s science to build a better potato. We may not build the fastest cars in the world, but we can drive the ones we have in all sorts of traffic without needing any sort of control. We may not have the fastest sprinter or marathon runner in the world, but we have plenty of women who can endure walking 6 kilometers to fetch 10 kg of water and haul it back, every single day for most of their lives. The sad thing is they need to. The good thing is they probably won’t have to for too much longer.
The question therefore is not how (or whether) India should get its Olympics act together. The question is: Are we like this only?
Yes, yes you can. He be blogged back when. But, I want someone who’s going to hog the limelight, stretch the 15 minutes to 30, someone who says, “Hey! Hey! Over here! Look at me!” Someone who will be paparazzi’d at the premiere of the next Gurinder Chadha flick.
Is Michael Chopra down with his brown? Anyone know?
Yes, for girls, I have heard this concern being expressed. It usually goes with general fear of athletic girls becoming less feminine and therefore, less suitable for arranged marriages. For contact/team sports, caste/class is an issue, too. If you go to the village football ground and start playing with everyone else, how do you ensure you are hanging out with folks of your ‘kind’? Growing up in villages and small towns of West Bengal, I used to play football (soccer) on summer afternoons and cricket during winters. Parents and elder relatives were always a lot more worried about the boys I used to hang out with during the football season. Compared to cricket, back then football was more of a ‘mass’ game — mass/elite determination was a complex function of ses, caste and location. General healthcare infrastructure being horrible, greater risk of physical injuries in contact sports was a big issue, too. Logistics was another concern. Male relatives were out all day trying to make a livelihood. Female relatives were not comfortable in public space of male sports — football, cricket, hockey, and athletics primarily. So it was up to school’s PE teachers and unemployed neighborhood dadas to groom and guide aspiring athletes — to accompany them to coaching camps, tournaments etc. They lacked resources and did not really have much at stake.
Compared to diet, genes, lack of financial incentives and macro infrastructures, these are smaller cultural issues, but they do add up — especially for those who still don’t have much of ses to lose by playing sports and could instead gain a lot from sporting successes — and perhaps can be changed more easily.
On a happier note, Dola Banerjee recently won a gold in World Cup archery and will be a strong contender in the next Olympics.
plz don’t tell me thats ur way of condescending to ppl who study theory in engg depts!? Because if you are, I must say you are a haughty person.
India has exactly zero Fields Medal winners out of nearly 50
Dude, you are completely missing the point. These medals are the domain of western world, they give it to people who they think fits their bill of excellence. Have you ever seen the list of Field’s Medal, they are, even when they are Chinese, they are linked to US (by job, and/ or immigration). Sure, they are brilliant mathematicians who get the stamp of approval of the western elite.
You want me to make laugh.
First, No fields medalist has (will) ever come close to Ramanujan, who died at the age of 33 in their legacy to mathematics (Fields Medal is given to under 40 mathematician). Not even close, by any shot. Let me give a nugget from no one than Hardy.
Would Ramanujan be ever given Field’s medal (it wasn’t there when he was alive)……..Absolutely not, he was a clerk from India, who tried to commit suicide at Cambridge. Other than Hardy, everyone ignored his letters, and would have not even discovered.
People like Meghnad Saha, Satyen Bose and Gandhi were bypassed for NP, Chandra 50 years later, getting cited for work he did in his 20s. It was almost a joke in Chandra’s case. People are given NP for proving Bose-Einstein condensate experimentally but he was never.
Using such metrics (Fields Medal, and all) to judge the entire society are sophomoric at best, and intellectual mediocrity at worst. Anyway, I am done with this thread. It is getting too predictable. You may continue, Sir, Good night.
Also, that point about IMO’s medals, etc. is moot because it is also a lot about problem solving training and such. You can argue this to an extent from the fact that, groups from the same country (because they attend the same training camps) tend to have a high correlation as to which problems they solve correctly. And I think Israel is no better than India in terms of the medals but I believe they have a lot of great people in the pure sciences (or is it just jews, and not israelis?)
Fair enough, random. Though I know someone who played nationals at a certain sport then gave it up to take the safe academic route. Of course playing nationals doesn’t make you world class or olympic winner or anything. Just saying that things are sometimes not so clear when you are young. Signing off.Thanks everyone for by far the most depressing thread on SM in a long time. 😉
pingpong (#159), if it is is any consolation, in the goodly little field of computer science, Raj Reddy has won the Turing award (and he is not even from an IIT gasp), and there are lots of other really big desi names who have made huge contributions.
Splendid timing:
Which reminds me of a favorite by Tagore:
Let ’em play outside.
People are missing the point, India missing out on Olympic medals is just a symptom of a problem. he fact that Indian middle class kids do npthing but study, every time I go back to India I’m horrified to see how the kids live and I’m not talking about the obvious hardships of growing up in the slums.
Take an average 15-30 year old India, their health is in a horrible state. “Race” has nothing to do with it, lack of exercise has everything to do with it, it’s a cultural problem. Some one said that the Indian body was constituted to survive famines, that is true about the human race as a whole, evolutionary change doesn’t happend in a couple of hundred years, it takes 10’s of thousands of years.
Sports is good for you, not only because you get laid if you’re good at it. You get a longer healthier happier life, period.
To get this out of the way first: Random, I am an engineer myself, and studying and applying theory is exactly what I do everyday at work. The problems I apply theory to are of high economic importance, and they are problems I enjoy working with, but they will remain mundane to any theorist, even an engineering theorist (such as some of my college professors), leave alone a pure science theorist. Similarly the theory will always remain esoteric to hands-on workers (like my shop floor foreman, who accepts the results of the math but doesn’t necessarily like it). I was totally not haughty in that statement – it is an exact description of my professional life, the different types of people some of whom are more theoretical and some of whom are more applied, both of whom are necessary in a good team. It only becomes a problem when one person says the theory is too esoteric and refuses to learn it, while another believes that the problem is too mundane and refuses to solve it. An ideal engineer is comfortable at both ends of the spectrum, even if not equally proficient in both.
Now that that’s out of the way:
Kush Tandon, we are in fact in agreement. My point is this: we should not be concerned about the low Olympics medal tally any more than we should be concerned about the low Fields medal tally or the low Nobel prize tally (and vice versa). Whether they are honors designed by the Western world for the Western world or not, they are still generally perceived to be high honors in their respective fields, which correlate rather well with pure sciences and pure math. (Btw, with specific regard to the Fields Medal and Ramanujan, the medal was instituted only in 1936, thus ruling out Ramanujan who died 16 years earlier. The fact that Ramanujan never got a Fields is not an insult by itself, any more than the fact that Euler never got the Fields is an insult to Euler. There may well have been other factors in Ramanujan’s life that indicated he was discriminated against on the basis of race, but not getting the Fields medal is not one of them.).
The analogy I make is this: just as the Olympics are a contest of pure physical power, the pure sciences and pure math are essentially displays of pure mental power (I’m deliberately disregarding the fight for funding in academic research). In particular, the race to get the respective honors in these fields (feel free to substitute anything else in place of Fields and Nobel) parallels the Olympics in terms of time, effort and training. (And to a lesser extent in case of the Olympiads, given the younger age of the Olympiad participants). I observe that India’s performance as a whole in both these contests is bad, and I believe that this indicates that India as a whole is relatively weak in doing pure anything (physical or mental), but that this is not a cause for worry because I believe India’s strengths lie in the application domain (engineering instead of science, computation instead of mathematics, entrepreneurship in general). There is a huge disclaimer to all this hypothesizing, that individuals may still accomplish a lot in their chosen area, pure or applied, notwithstanding anything mentioned above.
Where we seem to disagree is whether the Fields and Nobel are truly representative of talent in their respective areas in a manner impartial to race/nationality/color – I believe that in general they are, and that lapses are not racially driven, while you don’t seem to think so. That’s OK – we can agree to disagree on that point, but we are in fact in agreement on the larger issue that we should not be overly concerned with a low medal tally.
Desi girls ARE into sports…but they prefer just working out at the gym instead of actual team sports and such…any desis here into scuba diving? I’m starting this year…tis not an Olympic sport, but it requires as much dedication and training…
I believe that in general they are, and that lapses are not racially driven
Yeah right, Kissinger gets an NPP but MK Gandhi doesn’t…..
Khashaba Jadhav: Independent India’s first individual Olympic medalist. Many believe he got screwed by the refs who made him play two back-to-back games.
Well not to be a sour puss, but it may well be possible that there’s a genetic explanation for the fact that India hasn’t produced any world class athletes outside of cricket (and golf – if you want to claim Vijay Singh). Look at the United Kingdom, where Indians presumably don’t suffer from malnutrition – the diaspora has produced a few world class cricketers but not a single soccer player (Michael Chopra is half white). Cricket involves hand eye coordination and the ability to flick the wrists, and not the same type of athletic ability or speed required in soccer.
I guess the foil against this argument is the fact that India was fairly decent in field hockey. But even here, when the sport transformed its emphasis from skill-based dribbling to its more athletic strategy today, India did not fare well.
Another foil is the performance of China, which has produced a few gold medalists in track and field, including the men’s 110 M hurdles. To their credit they’ve identified and cultivated talent.
For American desi athletes, I would bet on baseball!
Ennis, some of us were too busy watching college and NFL football this weekend. 🙂
I really don’t buy the “genetically indisposed” or “vegetarian diet” hypotheses. Not because they’re without merit, but because even among those who are well-nourished and/or omnivorous, participation in sport (as a profession) is, in my experience, highly discouraged. Both my aunt and great-aunt qualified for the Indian National Olympic teams (for field hockey and 100m hurdles) and were told that they were not allowed to join the team because it was indecent to show their legs in front of a mixed audience (i.e. men). Granted that was 20-50 years ago, but I hear the same when it comes to my teenage cousin (who plays tennis), my 20-something cousin (soccer), and I definitely heard my share of griping from my dadi and extended family the entire time I was on sports teams (age 7-17). At least among the upper/middle class, there is an under-appreciation for (non-military) physical talent, particularly talent in sport, relative to education or “maths and engineering.”
And I’m with Amitabh, chess does not qualify as a “sport.”
Meena, I totally disagree. This may be observer bias on my part, but at least where I grew up 90%+ of all desi female athletes were on sports teams (and about 50% of the desi women I knew were athletes). While from college onwards the gym participation goes way up and team participation goes way down, I think this is true for women in general. I can’t speak for the des, but I would guess that the same is true (i.e. more participation in soccer/field hockey than going to the gym solo).
I would actually say India is not even very good at cricket if you consider the talent churned out compared to the population. Pakistan and SriLanka are the equivlaent of a state in India. Yet India which is virtually an all star compilation of all the Indian state cricketers has a hard time beating any of these countries. And countries like England and West Indies – not many people give a damn about cricket over there. And both are tiny compared to India when it comes to resources and population pool.
Re: Chess Most jocks would get a brain hemorrhage if they were thrown in the high-stress world of chess.
“Behold the mighty Englishman. He rules the Indian small,. Because, being a meat-eater,. He is five cubits tall. “
Doggerel verse taught to schoolboys in the 1880s Gujarat, as reported by Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography.”
The British on the whole were not very big in the early 1800s, at least among the lower classes of London and I believe that most of the British in India were from the less favored classes. The average height for men in London, circa 1800 was about 5’2″. I read that in a book on social history, and had a little trouble believing it, but if true, it was probably due to the influx of people into the urban areas during the Industrial Revolution. From about 1780-1850, conditions and nutrition were probably worse for a higher percentage of city-dwellers than at any time in England before or since. The less affluent in England ate hardly more meat than vegetarian Indians. The peasants living on potatos were better off than the city-dwellers living on moldy bread and tea.
This was considered alarming to English authorities, as even then they recognized that this size was abnormal for their country and poorer people actually appeared to be shrinking. The average height for the upper classes was over half a foot taller. There was a deliberate effort made to improve the status of urban poor, first by writers and journalists, later by an active social work movement heavily staffed by upper class women. They still need to do more with the dental situation though. India has a far bigger job, but as nutrition and health improve, so should physical stamina.
The interesting thing about the English attitude toward athletics is that it is the well-to-do and most educated who were the most accomplished athletically, and this was very admired as long as they were also accomplished in other areas. I do suspect that meat-eating had a lot to do with it.
Competing at the highest levels of international sport requires an infrastructure to locate, nurture, develop and progress talented individuals. This is what is lacking in Indian sport, nothing else. Is it right to say that Romania or East Germany were more sporting nations, and their populace greater natural athletes than say, Italy, because of genetic or cultural reasons? They pumped money into sporting infrastructure, the same as China is doing now. India for a variety of reasons doesn’t have that. Hell, it doesnt’t prioritise it, and basic educational infrastructure is lacking. America is the fattest nation on Earth, with the highest obesity levels anywhere, but it still locates, nurtures and helps to succeed its athletes with a highly developed infrastructure, college system and so on. All the chatter about DNA and genetics and meat eating is thinking too much about a simple issue.
surgery is high stress, but it is still not a sport. calling chess a sport is a REAL stretch of the word. its a board game. a really well designed one, but not a sport.
most of the desi grls i knew growing up were more about maintaining a primp and proper image, and spending a lot of daddys money instead of sports. maybe thats local variation
Well, let us, DBD’s and ABD’s, not use sports – or the lack of it – as a way to take convenient potshots at each other. First, I don’t think physical exertion or the lack of it has anything to do with it. That’s insulting to the millions of farmers who do backbreaking physical labor in the fields to produce all the stuff that ends up, ghee-laden and/or fried, on the plates of the average middle-class bookworm. Culture may have something to do with it. As Sakshi, RC and Sanjay point out, lack of sports culture is partly because of financial insecurity that makes parents steer their kids away from sports, seen as a risky career. But more than that, I think it is the general lack of availability of physical space for any kind of physical activity. Add to this the class-consciousness of the average middle-class Indian and there is a recipe for general sloth that comes coated with a lot of sneering at other people. Going back for vacs to the old hometown Kolkatta, from my regular life as a tennis- and badminton-playing army brat (we were outdoors or playing some sort of sports from 4:30-7:30 everyday), what I found odd was how every scrap of space in the city was given up to either eking out a livelihood (selling peanuts or chanas on the streets) or just to living (houses built up on every last inch of alloted land). Where were the kids to play? The streets, if they were lucky. But what about kids in high-rises? Where did they go? Turns out they either played tepid games of soccer in the parking lot downstairs or they had to be schlepped to their parents’ clubs to play tennis or something. As for the local playground, heaven forbid that the dear little baba or baby should play on the same swingset as the ayah’s son or the dhobi’s daughter. So, unless your individual neighborhood association is really good, the local parks (at least in Kolkatta) are a decrepit, weed-infested filth-ridden place where only the local stray dogs go to take a dump. Also, the place where the local destitutes put up shacks and precious playspace is once again sacrificed to living space. And I know I mentioned stray dogs, but I’ll stop before I get started on that particular menace…
In the diaspora, the greater emphasis placed on education over sport amongst first generation immigrants restricted the participation in professional sport in the second generation. That will change as the next generation supports their children when they show talent. They key to a successful sportsperson is parental enthusiasm. When you have a generation of British or American Indians who are as passionate about baseball or soccer as everyone else, you’ll see them driving their kids wherever they must to compete, investing their time and hopes and encouraging them. That’s when you’ll see sportsmen emerge in games other than cricket. But that’s the diaspora, not India.
why is the emphasis in this analysis on medals per capita? shouldnt it be medals per dollar spent or something? You can have a country like the US earning a lot of medals, but they also spend a lot of dough on earning these medals.
Chess does not involve too much physical exertion, true. But it still calls for years of training, discipline and practice, in common with other sports. But more importantly, it demands arguably a much higher level of psychological toughness than many team sports, perhaps even than individual athletic and track sports. Don’t forget that chess matches and moves are timed, and in that respect, similar to other sports that are timed.
I think the psychological element of what it takes to win – at anything, including sport – is often underrated. The history of Indian sport has many individual incidents where, for example, a ‘final push’ and a ‘will to win’ could have won medals. There are incidents also of athletes ‘peaking too soon’ or failing to make their previous individual bests, sometimes achieved as recently as the previous day in the ‘heats’ – on the day of the finals.
Maybe India’s chess grandmasters could teach Indian athletes some psychological tactics!
surgery has all of these in common with sports. still, surgery is not a sport.
“I would actually say India is not even very good at cricket if you consider the talent churned out compared to the population. Pakistan and SriLanka are the equivlaent of a state in India. Yet India which is virtually an all star compilation of all the Indian state cricketers has a hard time beating any of these countries. And countries like England and West Indies – not many people give a damn about cricket over there. And both are tiny compared to India when it comes to resources and population pool. “
This is not the result of Indian’s being less good at cricket ‘per capita’ than Sri Lanka or Pakistan, but simply evidence that there is a limit to human proficiency in a particular ability. For example, Brazil is about 3.2X the size of Italy population wise. Although Brazil is probably the most accomplished soccer nation, you cannot say that the Brazilian team is three times as good as current olympic champion Italy. However I would bet that if you take a single state out of Brazil, and provided the same resources and training that the national team would get, they would be as competetive as Italy, and nearly as competetive as the current Brazilian team. Similarly if you took say the Maharasthra cricket XI for example, I would guess they would be a top-class international side capable of contending for the World Cup.
On another point, which has been refuted plenty of times here, people seem to assume that North Indians, and by extension Pakistanis, are more athletic than southies. However evidence shows it is not the case. Most of India’s small amount of world class athletes are from the South. There was an article a while ago on outlookindia.com about this phenomenon.
But what would people do without lazy stereotypes and unthinking cliches based on tiresome minor prejudices? They wouldn’t have naything to say at all then.
Good point well made!
Most local playgrounds or gardens in Mumbai are walking tracks for the elderly. They won’t allow any ball games there.
I wouldn’t put lack of sporting achievement to genetics or diet. It has to do with money or lack of money in India playing professional sports outside cricket. Even cricketers make their money mostly through endorsements and not prize money or retainers. In that market it is not performance on the field but marketability that matters.
On the qualifications of games, such as chess and snooker as ‘sports.”
They way I like to look at it is that a sport consists of three critical components: an athletic component, a ‘skill’ component and a ‘thinking'(game) component . In my view, for example, running a 100-meter dash is more an athletic event than a sport. It follows that under my classification there are varying degrees of sport. I would say basketball, soccer, tennis, football, are a few examples of sports that mix a good level of athletic demand with a ‘game’ element. Golf, for example, is highly loaded on the ‘skill’ component, but somewhat lacking on athletic demand, and has essentially no ‘game’ component. Chess is a very good ‘game,’ but does not really demand physical skill or athletic ability.
“America’s fastest growing sport is turning left.” P J O’Rourke on NASKAR. What is sport can be as debatable as what is art. Some of us are just questioning the Oog likes to sweat. Oog big athlete assumption. Kasparov and Anand’s training includes physical exercise, btw.
Puli, you’re missing the point. Surgery is not a sport, nor is chess a physically demanding activity. The point is that physicality is not all that is needed in sports success. Psychological toughness is just as, if not more important, and something that is often underrated or ignored altogether.
ack, NASCAR.
Chachaji and Puli, perhaps a sport is an activity that requires all the training, discipline and practice at the highest levels, but which in addition can be done for amusement by anybody who is not set on winning (or doing it well). For instance, I could certainly play tennis with Boris Becker – I would be handed my ass on a plate but I can still play him. Surgery (and many other professions) do not have that option – the consequences of failure are dramatic and the chances of a raw beginner or amateur doing it correctly are rather low.
That definition does not however distinguish between games, sports and just recreational activities (like rock climbing). I suppose that any recreational activity could be played competitively. Based purely on etymological arguments, “sportsmanship” is a positive attribute associated with playing rather than winning, while “gamesmanship” is a negative attribute associated with winning rather than playing.
Given that, I can’t explain why the Olympics are the Olympic Games and not the Olympic Sports. I suppose “faster higher stronger” makes it necessary to win?
ill buy that. ill buy chess as a game that requires mental and psychological discipline.
ESPN televises poker too, but I don’t consider poker a sport, even though it is a competitive activity that requires mental toughness.
Competitive eating is harder – that’s a physical competition … you know, that’s one sport that desis should do great at …
So none of you buys the argument that India does poorly in sport because there is little pre-marital sex to serve as an incentive for (ahem) performance?
“If they were being played at the same time, is there one that the countries assign more importance to? Maybe putting their B team in the other one?”
the India-England test and odis were being played on the same tour but not at the same time. they played five tests and then played 7 odis. with the exception of a few players, most of the test players played in the odis, including the superstars like tendulkar, dravid and ganguly.
india will do better in a more variety of sports given more time, a change in thinking about sports as a career and as the country has more resources to put into sports (and if it cleans up its bureaucracy and officialdom) and attract those for whom money/proper training facilities is the main issue (india has a luger, but he has to train mostly in europe and the indian team to the winter olympics had more officials than athletes). more than a decade ago, madhu sapre probably lost out on the miss universe crown when she said she would build a world class sports stadium in india if she was prime minister. she was sort of ridiculed for that answer because both in india and abroad, people’s perceptions/knowledge of india were such that the idea of using money to build a sports stadium in “mother teresa-india ” was shocking. but you already see the diversification of sports in india – and chess is certainly more of a sport than trampolining at the Olympics – with rising interest in Formula 1 (with Karthikeyan now building his own team and Vijay Mallya buying his own team), an indian girl doing well in world junior squash, sania mirza (although india has a tennis tradition), and randhawa/atwal/singh and others in golf etc. it’s a tiny step and it is still restricted and privileged to a few but it’s a start. even in cricket, you have more players now coming from the so-called “fringes” of india where cricket is concerned – munaf patel from a small, poor Gujarat village, Dhoni from Ranchi, Sreesanth from Kerala.
kamran abbasi wrote on his pakistan cricket blog at cricinfo that one of the main reasons why pakistan may produce more fast bowlers and india more spin bowlers/batsmen is because of the role model effect. so instead of the usual cliches about meat-eating pakistanis producing fast bowlers/vegetarian indians producing spin bowlers etc etc, he pointed out that the likes/success of Imran Khan, Waqar and Wasim and others in early days acted as a role model for the younger generation and perpetuated a cycle whereby more pakistanis wanted to be fast bowlers because of the previous success of pakistan in this area. likewise with india and spin bowling and batting, two of india’s traditional strengths in cricket. more indian youngsters wanted to be the next gavaskar/sachin tendulkar or prasanna/bedi/kumble because of the impact they had on the game. now we see more indian quicker bowlers because of the likes of Srinath, Prasad.
likewise sania mirza is becoming a role model. sure, she’s not tall and as physically imposing as the williams sisters or sharapova etc, but neither is justine henin and she beat them and won the us open. and mirza has a lot of power that belies her smaller frame, like henin. while height and muscular strength is increasingly more important in many sports, it’s not always the be-all and end-all. i think abbasi is right in citing the role model effect. the more indians who become successful at sports – be it cricket/tennis or any other sport, the more youngsters will want to emulate them and, if they can also make a decent living at sports and be respected by society, as is the case with cricket and tennis in india right now, then more parents will be open to those avenues for their children. and some sports just don’t have the infrastructure right now in india to support them.
im going to start a SM inter city competative $hitting competition. east coast vs west coast. i think that might qualify as a sport by some definitions on this board.
Indians comprise 45% of Trinidad’s population, and yet there was not a single Indian player on their outstanding national football (soccer) team that qualified for the 2006 World Cup. OTOH, the Indo-Carribean community has thrown up outstanding cricketers. I hope we see some Asians in the Premiership soon to refute the genetic determinism conjecture!
I heard that soccer was once immensely popular in Calcutta, but after the ’94 World Cup, when Bengalis came to understand that their own boys were not even remotely near international caliber, cricket supplanted soccer as the more popular sport.
Speaking of cricket, the Twenty20 World Cup starts tomorrow.