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 journalist is a hack! Just kidding, I just think people use the term “sport” way too loosely. Something can require a lot of skill and thought and still fail to be a sport (and I mean that in an entirely non-normative way). I think curling barely qualifies as a sport. I’m torn on golf, but lean towards the golf is not a sport camp as well.
There shouldn’t be so much fuss about this. The International Olympic Committee recognizes Chess as a sport. I think the American bias against the idea stems from the fact that chess is equated with nerdery, and the nerd archetype is considered the antithesis of the jock archetype.
http://www.olympic.org/uk/sports/recognized/index_uk.asp
r u saying brown (or wheatish) guys are not purveyors of porn? perhaps there’s another cause. pulli?
no. the small numbr of veatish guys in the US can spend a lot of money on prn per capital. they can be be@ting off constantly. the only problem is that there are so few of them relative to whyte and blk guys that the market is not designed to cater to them. if 300m brown dudes showed up in the US tomorrow, that would change.
camille, the point is, by its status as an official recognized sport, chess is a sport. i get the opposite feeling here. that chess people really like chess and other “sports”, but that they are reacting to some rather disdainful put-downs of chess as somehow not “macho” enough as something that requires physical exertion and that top chess players don’t work as hard as other “real athletes” as I said what constitutes an athlete is debatable. who’s the greater athlete? Tiger Woods or Roger Federer or someone else? And why?
you say: “Being an athlete is hard, physically demanding, emotionally/mentally exhausting, time-consuming work.” well, chess players at the higest level will tell you that they meet all those criteria. so do day labourers/farmers. Why is chess less of a sport than weightlifting? Chess is more emotially/mentally draining, requires intense, sometimes physically draining concentration for longer periods of time and it’s hard and requires greater skill overall – in more areas of the brain/body. being very strong doesn’t necessarily make you a good athlete. it’s all very arbitrary. anything can be turned into a contest, it’s true, but some traditions have the force of history, have a higher premium of skill (so chess is a recognized sport and checkers isn’t. i personally think cricket requires more overall skill than baseball, but i’m sure others will disagree). don’t be offended, but don’t you think your reaction on the other thread to people who didn’t particularly find the salwar-kameez as great a garment as the sari is the same as those here who take exception to chess being putdown as somehow not as great as other sports? it’s not objectively more exciting/superior to other sports, but neither is it objectively less exciting/less demanding/inferior to other sports or athletes.
“Heck, I barely consider golf a sport.”
try driving the ball as far as Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh or Ernie Els or Phil Mickelson for four rounds of consecutive world-class golf and see if it’s not physically demanding and if it doesn’t take a toll on one’s back, shoulders, joints, legs.
Why is chess physically demanding? It doesn’t require much strength, stamina or coordination in order to play chess. One can play chess even if one is a quadriplegic directing a robot hand via puffs of breath, there’s nothing in the sport that requires anything more than the minimum level of physicality.
I agree that Chess is a difficult competitive activity, but for me “physically draining concentration” isn’t enough for a sport.
Honestly, I’m not following your logic here. What is your definition of a sport, what does it include and what does it exclude?
risible, the Olympics committee does not say that chess is a recognized sport, it says that the federative Association for chess (world-wide) is recognized by the Olympic Committee. It’s the difference between recognizing FIFA as the official world-wide organization for soccer versus recognizing soccer, in its own, as a sport.
WGiiA, are you seriously saying that the amount of physical exertion required by stress is equivalent to running a marathon? If that’s the case, then I think whoever is enduring that level of stress during chess ought to seriously consider taking up a (physical) sport. I personally love chess — it’s one of the only games I bring with me every time I move. I also love Scrabble. That said, my appreciation (or lack thereof) for a game does not make it a sport. I really think the argument that it somehow takes more skill or exertion overall than a basketball game is a load of bollocks. What it sounds like is that some people like/love chess and feel that a lack of recognition for chess as a sport somehow demeans it. Here are other things that don’t qualify as sports, in my book: running on a treadmill, using an elliptical, rowing on a rowing machine (but never on a boat or in a race).
I don’t think my reaction (sari v. salwaar kameez) is comparable, partly because I was joking, but also because I’m not arguing at all that chess is inferior to other physical activities. I’m just saying it’s not a sport. I think classifications should be reliable and consistent, and I personally don’t feel that chess meets any of the criteria for how a sport is designated. Maybe if we were playing full-contact old school real people on a chess board chess I would think otherwise.
Camille,
It wouldnt recognize Chess’s sports federation if it didn’t think it was a sport!
There’s a troubling mind-body dualism at work in some of the asumptions here. Mental exertion and the attendant stamina needed for it are PHYSICAL – they rely on brain processes and certain intangibles, like the will to win the competition, which exist in other sports, though because the physical outer-body component is predominant in those other sports, go underemphasized in analysis.
yeah, but no one specifically mentioned birth defects, which are difficult to avoid seeing evidence of in india.
um, what? india has its own porn industry which obviously uses brown guys.
risible, conceded (the sports designation), despite my clearly anti-nerd, pro-macho outlook 😉
I don’t disagree that mental activity can also be physically strenuous. I just don’t think it’s anywhere near as strenuous as something that requires intense mental concentration AND physical activity.
but porn is globalized via the internet, no?
YES!!! India needs less nerds and more jocks. Seriously. And the reason there are so many nerds is because the parents mold them into that from day one. I do understand that India is a tough place to make a living, and that future prospects are dismal for people who don’t do well on exams and so forth, but the nerdy values of the parents are foisted on the little kids.
Many people have made good points…India has limited space, way too many people, no coaching, no equipment, poor nutrition, poor health, major social divisions like caste which also play a role in athletics, etc….but the main thing (in addition to all those) is that athletics and sports are just not part of the culture (except in rural areas of some states like Punjab for example). In the town I grew up in in NJ, each school (two primary, one middle, one high) had fields, a big gym, basketball hoops. etc. Gym class had some excellent equipment and teachers. There were intramurals after school. Kids’ dads would be out playing with them. In a way, it’s an indoctrination into a sports-loving world. I myself was disadvantaged in that world because my parents did not come from that cultural background, and we lived in a tiny apartment in the Bronx until I was 8…by the time we moved to the Jersey ‘burbs, kids my age were way ahead of me. And my dad was not about to start coaching me in baseball and football. So I stayed away from sports, and didn’t embrace fitness and physical activity until I was an adult. But many kids in my town lived and breathed sports. The goal is NOT to be an Olympian…the goal is to embrace an active, physical lifestyle, and have fun, and keep it up even after you’ve left school and college. Team sports are a big part of that. I mean, instead of playing chess (something I would be dissappointed if my kids were to embrace), why not go out and play a sport with some friends? Isn’t it better than a video game or watching tv and eating potato chips all day long?
anyway, pulli…my central point is that indians are underepresented in hoops for the same reason they’re underrepped in porn: they don’t like to bang the rim.
The downside is that many kids were obsessed with sports to the extent of ridiculing academics, and then they suffered for that attitude later on in life too. It’s a balance, and of course schoolwork is a priority over athletics (or should be)…like I said, it’s a balance.
i really, really dont think thats the case. im pretty sure it has to do with the demand for prn with various kind of actors in it. if there was a demand, it would be filled. im sure i could find a prnstr quality desi male.
My computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick-boxing.
— attributed to Emo Philips
must be the small feet then.
Manju, you were waiting this whole time to write that, weren’t you? 🙂
again, im sure one could umm…err…fill the demand if it was there.
you mustve had a bad sample of desi guys….
just dyin’, camille. it was either that or they don’t like to go downtown
Ennis, in theory this is true, but at GM levels of professional play, chess players do put themselves through grueling physical workouts. I remember that Anand went through a brutal cycling regimen in Spain and that Kasparov favored swimming at similar levels. The reason put forth was something along the lines that sitting still for 2 hours or longer is one of the most punishing postures for the body, and the body requires a lot of muscle toning to take that kind of abuse; maybe they didn’t want to be distracted by their feet going to sleep or something. I don’t know how much of this is based on sound reason and how much is because the person just liked to bike or swim or whatever.
Typically desi arrogant delusions:
Reality check: desis do not “rule”; and IQ tests reveal that average desi IQs are way below the global average. Its not just in sports that the subcontinent lags behind other regions of the world.
Again, if desis actually “excelled” in the above areas would the subcontinent be so hungry, so backward and so impoverished?
Do you also “revel” in “serious” desis performing miserably in other non-serious accomplishments such as properly feeding and educating their children? Or failing to provide sanitation facilities for the great majority of indians?
err…i think we covered that on another thread.
A lot of desi moms should have a career in Nascar judging by the driving skills of your everyday ‘auntie’.
i also considered going with something about excessive “loose ball fouls” or “reaching in.” i gave this much thought, as you can see.
chess players certainly require stamina to sit and concentrate for extended periods of time. it does require hand and eye coordination, and in speed chess even more so. i went to a chess tournament in college for world-level players. some of them were concentrating so hard they were sweating and breathing heavily. their heart rates went up. i’m not claiming it’s as physically demanding as a marathon or a five-set tennis match (but it might probably be more so than some of the powder-puff 40 minute 6-0,6-0 women’s tennis matches we often see) or a soccer match or that a chess champion is as great a physical athlete as a marathon runner or soccer star. as i said, its arbitrary what a sport is, even at the olympic level. i do agree that most sports have a greater level of physical exertion involved, but that doesn’t necessarily make them better than a recognized sport like chess. weightlifting is a sport and physicall demanding at a certain level and its incredibly boring and repetitious), not to mention full of doping. but who is more of an athlete, the weightlifter who is physically stronger at a predictable rote set of movements that don’t change except for a heavier weight or the long distance runner who is not as strong but has more stamina or the speed chess player who can use both his brain and his hands to do quick, correct precise and complicated movements that change according to the nature of the game? you said you don’t really consider golf a sport, so what is a sport then? i agree that chess is more of a mental sport than a physical sport, but it is a recognized sport nonetheless.
If there was any sense, mountaineering would be an olympic sport. it tests everything in the extreme.
camille, i didn’t say chess took more physical exertion than basketball, but by the same token you saying it doesn’t take the same level of skill as basketball is also incorrect because you’re comparing apples and oranges. each requires a particular set of skills, mental and physical ability. you’re putting a premium on physical activity in sports and that’s fine. i actually don’t disagree that most sports are more physically taxing than chess. but it’s not the walk in the park that some people seem to think it is, especially at the highest levels. the pressure is incredibly intense and you cannot separate the mind/body. but as a competitive event, just like the grand slam championships or master’s or pga championship, it also holds its excitement and allure in proportion to the passion of the people who follow it.
“What it sounds like is that some people like/love chess and feel that a lack of recognition for chess as a sport somehow demeans it. Here are other things that don’t qualify as sports, in my book: running on a treadmill, using an elliptical, rowing on a rowing machine (but never on a boat or in a race).”
but aren’t you doing exactly what you say others are reading into what you say? in some minds you are demeaning chess when you compare it to running on a treadmill, using an elliptical etc., especially chess at kasparov and anand’s level. they are not playing recreational chess, just like marathon runners aren’t jogging for fun. When Anand is recognized in India amongst the country’s most prominent sportspeople, are we to demean him and say “haha, it’s not even a sport?” who knows, he may even agree with you and find the tag of sport demeaning in itself:) you’re right in that you determine what you do/don’t consider a sport. but so do others. i detest american football but i recognize that others consider it a bonafide sport/entertainment and that it requires certain skills. some don’t consider golf a sport, so is golf the same as chess? it certainly requires a more obviously physical component than chess, but why isn’t it considered a sport by some? just because the olympic committee does/doesn’t recognize an activity or include it in its programme every four years doesn’t mean that activity is less worthy. over the years many sports have come and gone according to the whims/changes/influences of the times.
Ah ha! I knew that ugly desi stereotype would rear its head on SM someday.
Don’t get me started on this particularly annoying stereotype perpetuated by the desi male – just don’t!
Some may hate me for saying this but our genetics also probably plays a part in our getting left behind. I had a black friend in high school and we both started lifting weights together. My dad had bought me a weight set, and the black friend (Nigerian) use to come to my house to lift. Initially I could lift more than him…but he soon improved and passed me easily to the point where he was easily benching 250 lbs and I was struggling to break 200 lbs. It was not from lack of effort as I was working out till the veins were ready to pop out in my forehead….and eating protein shakes etc…while I did not see him eat anythiing special, or work out any more than me. He also put on more mass than me. This despite me being a jatt and belonging to so called ‘martial’ race.
I also think that 115 degree summer also makes everyone lethargic and slows the metabolism down. When I visit India in summertime….moving to get a glass of water is an effort. Where are the servants?
you REALLY REALLY need to upgrade your sample of desi guys…
Sathya:
r u single? i’d like to set you up with this chick prema. take her to korean restaurant. she’d love it.
ah….a nice myth (that some races are intrinsically martial)
@ Amitabh
I completely agree with you that being physically active is an important part of being fully human. But I think we’re all failing to consider that American society itself is very stratified. The New Jersey suburbs you moved to after age 8 where the school had fields and all that sports equipment, etc. — that’s a very different experience from the just-as-American kids who grow up in urban areas where it’s not safe to play outside, schools are stressed to improve math and reading scores and therefore neglect everything else, and the most available food is McDonald’s. So yeah, I don’t think we can quite say that ‘America’ is much better about physical activity when there’s this obesity epidemic going on.
Also, I think there’s an overemphasis on competitive sports in gym class when you’re in elementary and middle schools here, as opposed to simply being active by yourself (like jogging). The focus becomes winning, and this is especially disadvantageous to girls (or at least it was when I was in middle school) because they tend to be more shy and self-conscious about being competitive, especially in sports when they’re playing with boys.
what I remember most about grls in gym class (besides grls in gym shorts) was the tendency for them to cluster in one corner and try to do as little as possible. you wanted to avoid hitting the volleyball into the “forest” of grls, because the grls would back off from the ball. what the heck was with all the grls i knew growing up? I was never an athletic viking, but cmon….
They feel racially superior to the brahmins and banias of hindu India, to the muslim bangladeshis etc; but suffer from a deep inferiority complex towards west asians.
Pathans/pashtuns aren’t desis, strictly speaking; by language, culture, ethnicity…
Though a large chunk of pathans do have south asian admixture, just as a significant chunk of desi punjabis have pathan admixture.
As long as you find something wrong with this picture, you’re probably OK.
Also, I freakin’ HATED those damn Presidential fitness tests they did in gym class every year. Sit-ups, push-ups, 100m sprint, pull-ups, UGH. Note that all of these also apply more to male physical fitness than female physical fitness.
Camille, Amitabh, I am down w/ the whole less nerds more jocks biz. My anti-jock remark was in response to that other stereotype. Chess = weakling activity or nawabi pastime. It is brutal, even violent. Not in an obvious way. To compare it to treadmill running misses the mark by a few light years. BTW, chess boxing people have tried to up the jock quotient, but it’s too much loaded in favour of pugs. Anyway I’m out.
c’mon, can’t we emphasize that people need to pay attention to their bodies too without resorting to some nerd-jock duality?
duh…what r u…some kind of fruity nerd?
well i definitely lean more toward nerd than jock. so i’m no help to my people at the olympics.
Pathans/pashtuns aren’t desis, strictly speaking; by language, culture, ethnicity…
There are hundreds of thousands of pathans living in UP itself. There are whole villages, small towns across UP (for example Khurja, Rampur) which have in bred Pathan families living in India for hundreds of years. They are as desi as any other desi.
and THATS what makes a desi…smell that inbreeding.
Then we’re saying exactly the same thing. I said just the same in my first post (that comparing chess to physical sports is pointless because they’re not comparable and do not entail comparing similar skill sets). 🙂 For the record, I didn’t say it takes more skill to play basketball. I said it was more physically strenuous to play basketball, and that in doing so one has to be relatively mentally alert as well.
That said, I’m not saying chess is better or worse than anything else. I’m also not comparing chess to running on a treadmill. I’m saying both activities are NOT sports, not that they’re “not sports” in equivalent or similar ways. They just both fail to meet any criteria I have in my head when I assess something as a sport. The reason I brought up the treadmill/elliptical was to address the critique that individuals do not classify chess as a sport because it is stereotyped as “nerdy” or “un-macho.” I was trying to provide non-“nerdy” examples of other activities that, in my opinion, miss the boat on the sports-classification.
Manju, I think you picked the best innuendo.
Yes, but isn’t it interesting that our best professional atheletes (not our OLYMPIC atheletes though) come from this background? So genetics is probably a factor, as is the intensity of the competition. The level of basketball played in inner-city areas is so tough and so hard, that probably a lot of varsity players from suburban high schools wouldn’t be able to handle it.
I think the fact that soccer in Trinidad is overwhelmingly a black sport (with little Indian presence) speaks volumes about the genetic component to athleticism. Of course there is a cultural component too.
Al_chutiya, I’m really skeptical about the Pathan claims made by some of these people…maybe they are Pathan through their paternal lineages (i.e their dad’s dad’s dad’s dad), but I think a lot of mixing with local desis has taken place…because they sure don’t look (on average) the same as pure Pashtu people living in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They don’t look like the typical U.P. village Hindu or local-convert Muslim either, so I’m not denying they have SOME Pathan heritage.
ShahRukh Khan is supposedly a Pathan…does he look like one? Is there any Pathan in Afghanistan who looks even vaguely like him? I’m sure he has some Pathan blood, but the non-Pathan elements are conveniently brushed under the carpet.
i’m not sure about the genetic factor in athleticism (i don’t really know, and don’t really care that much honestly), but i think it’s a little disingenuous to say that because indians don’t play certain sports in large numbers, it means we’re genetically predisposed to being un-athletic when there ARE also cultural factors at play. until we see loads of indians try playing a certain sport and absolutely fail at it i don’t think that really holds.
Some of the reasons given here for the miserable desi record in sports:
Except that africans and middle-easterners who live in climates as hot or even hotter than south asia outperform desis in sports on a regular basis.
No doubt casteism is a millstone around India’s neck. Besides the above point, brahminism denigrates physical labor as something low. A culture dominated by castes that recoil from strenous physical activity isnt likely to be world class in sports. So why isnt Pakistan doing much better than India in sports? When was the last time it won an olympic medal?
Desis should just embrace their blackness. Its foolish and futile to play the colorism game that desis just cannot win no matter how diligently they avoid sun exposure.
Exactly. Desi food is probably the least nutritious in the world. Spices, oil/ghee, starch and overcooked veggies which are the staple desi diet arent at all conducive to physical fitness. Its not just the widespread malnutrition its also the kind of food that desis eat thats a major handicap.
Possibly to some extent. But I dont think that desis are even close to living up to their genetic potential. And for this only culture can be blamed.
300!