For a country with a population of about 1.2
Billion people, half-dozen medals won in the London Olympics may not be a tall
feet by any standards. However the 6 medals represent India’s best ever result
on the biggest sporting stage in the world. The fact that the country had won
just seven individual medals in the Olympics since Independence should help put
the latest achievement in perspective. The absence of a gold medal, in contrast
to the Beijing effort, is certainly a dampener and so too the overall slide in
the medals ranking from 50 to 55. For a country with an annual sports budget of
just over Rs 721 crore, where bureaucrats and sports administrators test the
endurance of athletes even before they qualify for the Olympics, the London
show should be considered encouraging even if it failed to live up to the hype
created by over-ambitious official agencies and fanned by the media.
While Indians may not come
close to the achievements of U.S.
swimmer Michael Phelps’s all-time
record Olympic medal haul of 22 and Usain
Bolt’s unmatched brilliance in the sprints where he completed a
back-to-back sweep of three gold medals, going
forward, India has the potential to win gold medals in the fields of archery,
boxing, shooting and hockey.
Indian medal winners — Gagan Narang, Vijay Kumar, Saina Nehwal,
Mary Kom, Yogeshwar Dutt and Sushil Kumar — deserve all the accolades,
including substantial cash awards that have been announced. That the country plunged to an all-time low in hockey is a matter of shame and no time should be lost by the goverment in overhauling the faction-ridden administration or in preparing a blueprint for the grassroots-level development of the game.
On this independence day let us cheer for our Olympic medal winners and hope that a lot more will be achieved in the years to come. Let us
also use this opportunity to salute again the achievement of Abhinav Bindra, the only individual Indian to ever win a gold medal
in Olympics.
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