Why is India so bad in sports ??

A nation feels proud while their players win a dozen medals in the global competitions and for a billion plus nation it matters a lot because it’s not just only make nation proud in globally but also motivates millions of youth to come forward, to play and make India proud.

In Beijing Olympic 2008, our medal tally were just 3 (1 Gold and 2 Bronze) and during London Olympic 2012, our medal tally drag to 6 that lulled us thinking we were racing towards sporting powerdom, even our official predictions of at least 10 medals in Rio 2016. 

Frankly a billion no of Indian were hopeless to get a single medal at Rio Olympic as our every top performer athletics has lost their game but kudos to Badminton champion P.V. Sindhu’s silver towards the end of the Rio Games sparked an outpouring of national pride and celebrations, along with wrestler Sakshi Malik’s late bronze.

A billion plus nation is expecting more when our player’s performance has been improving in globally but in Rio Olympic, we seemed unable to deal with the added pressure, and we seemed to lack the depth required when coming up against some really impressive competitors.

India, a country obsessed with Cricket, has never finished high on the medal table — winning just 28 from 24 Olympic appearances.  Why our Players were struggling to win a medal?? If we can celebrate while winning a medal then why not we have to think about our poor performance??

According to me some of the common reason behind our Poor Performance at Rio Olympic; we don’t have special fund especially for sports. We don’t have good trainer cum training academy. We don’t focus much to encourage other games (except Cricket), even sometimes it’s very difficult to find mutual understanding between Players and Coach (As most of the athletics players feel unconscious with their coach because of some kind of harassment). Indians are a large and diverse gene pool. We don’t spend enough or in the right direction to win Olympic medals. We don’t have a decent sporting culture or a grassroots pipeline to catch young talented in sports. Apart as partly true a dozen no of Indian Parents don’t support kids to play and even participate in sports as it has no future.

It is important to see numbers, Australia with a mere 20 million pollution, averages around 50 medals in every Olympics. The total amount it spends on sports around Rs 700 crore, of which 80% (Rs 560 crore goes into Olympic sports but in India, Sports Minister Vijay goel in rajya sabha on 26 July 2016 said that his minister is going to spent Rs. 49.2 crore ($7.3 million) on India’s Rio athletes that included Rs 25 crore under Target Olympic Podium (TOP) scheme. Apart from another 49.2 million ($7.1 million spent on 67 sports federations since 2012. This is nothing compared to the Australia, which has gone from any Olympics also ran to Top 10 position. 

In general India is weak in sports that require world class levels of physical fitness, although it in terms of poor sports infrastructure and the corruption that undoubtedly affects sports administration in India.