State of play

With the Indian Olympic Association hoping to bid for the 2020 Olympics, India’s debutante ball may be twelve years down the road. By then, its GDP would be about 90 percent of what China’s is today, and the games would — like those in Tokyo, Munich, Seoul and Beijing — signal a power’s arrival as a player on the global stage.

But for all the celebration and glitz that would surround a successful Delhi Olympiad, there should be fears of possible downsides: organisational failures in a country where infrastructure is occasionally held hostage to public dissent; politically motivated demonstrations when the world’s attention is focused on every aspect of India’s profile; and, perhaps most embarrassingly, the host country’s sporting performance during the games.

India has also witnessed a steady improvement in its overall sporting performance in the past two decades. Despite well-documented declines in showcase sports such as football and hockey, India has certainly made strides at the sub-Olympic level, finishing eighth in the last two editions of the Asian Games and fourth in the past couple of Commonwealth Games. Yet it has consistently fallen short at sport’s largest stage, when faced with opposition from not only its Asian and Commonwealth rivals, but also the United States and much of continental Europe. In fact, India is at a disadvantage even before the games begin. In Beijing, Indians qualified for only 13 of the 34 Olympic sports, and have so far been in the hunt for medals in only six: archery, badminton, boxing, shooting, tennis and wrestling.

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