Run we can, and…

It was the London 2012 Olympics when we were all curious to know whether our all time great Abhinav Bindra who had famously won the gold medal in the Beijing 2008 Olympics will continue to win us more medals. We also wanted to see if the investment in the athletes will pay off. We were able to win six medals then, which is the richest haul in any Olympics for India till date. Once those games had culminated, it gave me the impression that we had won at least ten medals. We had struck silver and bronze, but our victories were looking so pyrrhic that the individual gold medal performance of Bindra was already bested by the combined ‘team’ performance of our London-bound athletes. So much so that my British colleague who was interning in India had hailed the Brits’ countless medals in equal light as India’s overall performances. However, then the fear of not being able to strike medals in team events was not up to the mark for India. That fear came back to haunt the Indian team in Brazil where the 2016 Olympics were held, and we ended up with two silver medals both in individual sport. We celebrated Dipa Karmarkar’s fourth place finish with such elan that we completely covered our mind with our incompetence in team sports.

Where India falters time and again is in not taking sports as a serious path to success. It is sport that gives us resilience, tests our resolve, sprinkles us with hope, fills us with buoyancy, gives us courage, and most importantly, makes us rise above every negativity of life such as hate, religion, race or caste.

We must excel in sports and give our Government a gumption to invest at least a billion dollars for the next Olympics.

We have been found floundering in swimming, cycling and countless other sports that require us to run. The meaning of a gold medal is that one needs to literally outrun and out-chase all the opponents.

We as a nation in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have failed to take as a personal insult when we go down fighting in a boxing match to China, or a table tennis match to a Hong Kong citizen who was born in China, or to a swimming semi-final qualifying heat to a Chinese Taipei citizen.

We as a nation have consistently failed to flame our inspiration from athletes of different race or religion who have won gold medal out of utter hopeless situations. The victory of the Tunisian who upset all odds to beat the fan-favourite Australian for a swimming gold medal will be a story that will always be etched in gold for me.

We as Indians wilfully obliterate our perspective of why some people such as a woman from Bermuda chose to renounce their British citizenship to go to Bermuda and defeated a Brit by a handsome margin to strike Gold medal in triathlon that too under extremely bad weather.

We must begin to excel in the power of learning from others and in giving credit where it is due. We must respect the value of the Gold medal for the winner when we don’t even reach the podium or are not good enough to be qualifying for it.

We must not sit back and harp upon our flash-in-the-pan victories even if they had come in a team event, although that rarity had happened to us more than four decades ago when we had won our last Olympic Hockey gold medal.

We must not count on odds to wait for the Chinese woman gold medalist to get disqualified so that our own silver medalist can somehow escape with a gold medal.

The single most important step that is required for all of us is to be mindful of the tropical climate of the Indian subcontinent and thereby to allow every single Indian to run and chase the glory. We must keep inspiring everyone to assign equal importance to running on the land, under the water, or in the form of a triathlon, even if it requires us to do that under the cold conditions of Himalayas or to go to China or Russia for practicing. We must encourage the children to best out their lungs and to identify their own halo of Gold medal in equal stead as the visualization of the Ohm chanting. We must live, breathe and learn from sport every single moment of life. We must let women take a lead in sports. We must not repent why chess or cricket have not yet been included in Olympics. We must value team sport significantly above an individual sport. We must clap the winners and learn from the struggles of every champion who is not an Indian. Above all, we must stop our extremely bad habits of indulging in cricket, Bollywood, politics and corruption.

To win a medal in Olympics requires nothing short of a Herculean effort. Let us call it an ‘Indian’ effort in the future. Together, when we have run a billion miles, then we must remind ourselves of “We can!” and then offer our own brand of Indian-ness to the world in the future Olympics. A target of 2 Golds, 3 Silvers and 10 Bronze should be enough for us to see us be eligible for hosting our own Olympics.

If some sane Indian person encounters this blog while she is running, then who knows we may inspire her to win a Gold medal in the present Olympics itself!