Nareej Chopra, Murali Sreeshankar and Jeswin Aldrin are the new Indian stars of athletics, some of them participating in the world championships that open today in Eugene, United States. But India is the country with the worst ratio between population and medals won at the Olympic Games. It seems to be mostly a question of culture and bad investments, but things are changing in recent years.
New Delhi () – The World Athletics Championships begin today in Eugene, United States. India will closely follow the performance of Nareej Chopra, the 24-year-old javelin thrower who won a gold medal (for the first time in athletics history) at the Tokyo Olympics by throwing the instrument 87.58 meters. . His personal best, however, set at the end of June at the Oslo stage of the Diamond League, is now 89.94 meters, and he could break the 90-meter barrier, if not at the World Championships in Eugene, in the Birmingham Commonwealth Games that start later this month or the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, scheduled for September. The sports press describes Chopra as a “boy next door” despite being chased by sports companies for endorsement deals and this year he received the national “Sports Star of the Year” award.
He is a new celebrity in the country and many promising Indian athletes could soon follow the same path. Chopra himself, who now trains near San Diego in the United States, believes that Indian athletics is in good health, especially in the long jump, a specialty in which Murali Sreeshankar, an athlete born in 1999, holds the national record. with 8.36 meters, a measure that he jumped in April of this year. His main motivation was healthy competition with another young athlete, Jeswin Aldrin, a 20-year-old Pentecostal from the small town of Mudalur, in Tamil Nadu. This season he landed just 10 centimeters short of Shreeshankar, but Aldrin, who also jumped a windy 8.37 (i.e. with a favorable wind greater than 2 m/s, too much for the jump to be considered valid) was not included in the team. of India for the World Championships. Trained by former Cuban champion Yoandri Betanzos and motivated by a determination to outdo his compatriot, he looks to have a promising future ahead of him.
However, while India is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country with 1.4 billion people by 2023, before Tokyo it held the record for the fewest number of medals won per capita at the Olympic Games, with a total of 28 medals. , the same amount that American swimmer Michael Phelps earned in his entire career.
Over the years, experts have tried to explain the reasons for India’s failure by various factors. First, despite thirty years of steady economic growth, India remains a poor country with a lack of infrastructure. Good connections are essential when it comes to traveling to training camps, national rallies and competitions. Other times, high rates of child malnutrition and genetic characteristics have been blamed, but these are reasons that do not withstand comparison with other countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya or Jamaica, which have similar rates of underdevelopment.
According to indian specialists it is rather a cultural issue. The caste divide has influenced the sports world for decades because elites have always considered intellectual achievement superior to physical achievement, and students who excel in exams have always enjoyed more media coverage than sports champions. Only cricket receives national attention.
However, in recent years, as the results of athletics show, things are changed a little. Following the 2016 Rio Olympics, in which India won just two medals, the government and companies have begun to invest in the sport, although funding has been directed mainly towards high-performance athletes rather than small federations. . Several NGOs try to fill the gaps in the government in the field of sport, although often their interventions in rural areas are more generalized and sport is part of cooperation projects only as an activity of social utility. That means their ultimate goal is not to create a sports culture. And as for companies, which, within the framework of corporate social responsibility initiatives, enjoy tax benefits if they invest in sport, a fundamental problem remains: it is difficult to raise funds for sports associations when there is no outstanding athlete who can be considered as source of income. For that reason, athletes only have the opportunity to collect a salary after they have reached the international stage.
And to reach the top of the international rankings it seems that there is only one way: invest in what is considered the base of the pyramid, the incubators, where talent can be recruited. In other words: in educational institutions, so that sport becomes an integral part of the lives of Indian children and adolescents. This, in turn, would allow NGOs and companies to better target their investments. Nareej Chopra only entered the field of athletics because his parents felt that he needed to lose some weight.
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