Performing at the Olympics : The bronze mentality
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: August 02, 2012 -

One bronze medal is what a country with 1.2 billion population has got to show for after 6 days of the Olympics.

India might just do better, with a handful of medal hopefuls still in the fray.

Sania Nehwal, world number 5 in badminton, five times world champion boxer Mary Kom, world number one archer Deepika Kumari and some others are all potential winners but then so were the others who made the cut in the first place.

Potential and actually winning it is what sets the champion apart from the wannabe and for too long India has been satisfied with producing a string of wannabes from its assembly line.

Sports does not remain static with athletes pushing themselves to the limit to achieve what was perceived to be unreachable at one point of time.

Grit, determination, uninterrupted devotion to the task at hand and helped in no small measure by technical and scientific approach, the world of sports is today much more than athletes stretching their limbs and muscles on the practice field.

What was a gold medal fetching effort may not be good enough for even a bronze four years later and nothing illustrates this better than the score of 700.5 which Abhinav Bindra managed to land the gold in Beijing 2008.

Gagan Narang had a score of 701.1 in the same event this time and this fetched him the bronze. There is a reason why Usain Bolt is talking about hitting 9.4 seconds in the 100 metre sprint.

This realisation never seems to have hit the think tank of the country when it comes to sports and in the process this has reduced the athletes from the country to the status of favourite whipping boys on the international stage.

The young L Devendro, who made an impressive debut, has to exorcise this ghost, if he is to repeat his first round show.

This is where the back room boys should step in and study how to walk the distance. A tough call to follow for the other competitors will be no push overs either.

Ultimately it may well boil down to the question of who is more hungry for a win. Winning is obviously not everything but it is definitely a much better proposition than merely participating.

This is the dictum behind each and every competition and though late, India seems to have woken up to this reality.

But then again waking up to the reality may not prove anything if this is not translated on the stage.

India had to wait till 2008, since the inception of the modern Olympics, to see its first individual gold medal while a country like Surinam did it way back in 1988, courtesy its swimmer Nesty.

As things stand today, Taipei is ahead of the medals table with one silver already in its kitty.

Every second year, that is after every Olympic and every Asian Games, the country goes into a bout of introspection only to forget that instead of the silver or the bronze there was the gold to be had.

It is this mindset which has to change, but then again this may be asking for too much in the backdrop of the scams and huge financial irregularities that the preparation for the Commonwealth Games left behind.