Opinion India’s 2036 Olympic dream: Time to prepare
Express View: India can't depend on just a handful of disciplines to get medals, there is a need to start investing in heavy-medal sports like swimming, gymnastics and athletics. Making its presence felt at the grandest sporting show on earth won't be easy.
Win the bid, put up a good show, manage a respectable medal’s tally — all three boxes need to be ticked. None of them is easy. But of course, each one is worth the effort. A month after the successful G20 meet in New Delhi, a week after the country’s record 100-plus medal haul at Asian Games, Prime Minister Narendra Modi scaled up the country’s sporting and organisational ambitions. In a strong pitch to the top International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) member in Mumbai, he made a formal declaration of India’s interest in hosting the 2036 Olympics. This, he said, was the country’s “age-old dream” and the “aspiration of 140 crore Indians”. Early indicators say that Ahmedabad, the city with the world’s biggest cricket stadium, in the state with the world’s tallest statue, could be in the running for hosting the greatest show on earth. But the Olympics is not just about affirming India’s new confidence on the global stage, or even putting in place sprawling sporting arenas with jaw-dropping design. Hosting a successful Olympics is a marathon with hurdles lining the way. Win the bid, put up a good show, manage a respectable medal’s tally — all three boxes need to be ticked. None of them is easy. But of course, each one is worth the effort.
The Olympics isn’t just an opportunity to give the venue a facelift, it can also help a city surmount long-standing predicaments and constraints and nudge residents to turn their face to the world. The Games come to cities that are cosmopolitan and that offer ease of movement and, in turn, they contribute to making them more open-minded — by loosening up dietary restrictions, for instance, as international travellers need to be catered to. Holding back visas, as has been the case for Pakistan cricket for the ongoing World Cup, too, won’t get any points from the IOC. Clean air and sustainability are the new Olympics buzzwords. London, Rio and Paris played it smart and used the Olympics funds to beautify the city’s underdeveloped areas and de-ghettoise its fringes. Hosting the Olympics also gives a chance to clean up sports administrations and implement long-pending reforms — national sports federations and the Indian Olympics Association (IOA) need a professional make-over and a self-sustaining model. Hosting the Games also puts the host country under a microscope in many more ways than just those that have to do with sports — all too often thin-skinned to international criticism, India will have to learn to be more tolerant.
A big medal haul can lift the spirits of a host nation and for that India will need to do better than ranking 48th on the medals tally at Tokyo in 2022. While streamlined government funding and planning has seen a significant upward shift in medal counts, much more needs to be done. India can’t depend on just a handful of disciplines to get medals, there is need to start investing in heavy-medal sports like swimming, gymnastics and athletics. Making its presence felt at the grandest sporting show on earth won’t be easy, and for India, the time to prepare for the magnificent challenge starts now.
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