Spectator sport will always be more rewarding than a medal hunt.
The mood was so celebratory after Abhinav Bindra got a gold in Beijing that it seemed unbelievable that the inflation still went further up and industrial growth further down. The PM’s advisory council, too, betrayed its lack of understanding of historical events by talking of only 7.7 per cent GDP growth. Don’t these chaps know better?
But, seriously speaking, what is the big deal about an Olympic gold? Perhaps the only answer is that we have not won too many.
Olympic medals do not tell much about a country’s position in the global order. Not too long ago, the medals tally would have the US and the USSR fighting for the top spot. Below them would be East Germany, West Germany, Japan, et cetera.
Of that list, some names have disappeared from the atlas while the others are associated more with stagnating growth and financial crises.
That shows the hollowness of Olympic glory. The USSR won all those medals because of a tyrannical system that compelled promising young athletes, some of them mere children, to follow a regimented life so they could help justify the Soviets’ only reason for existence: a battle for false supremacy with the US. All those medals did not achieve anything more than an ego kick for the communists.
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Some of the poorest countries have produced long-distance runners who would simply keep running until they reached the top of the podium. They remain poor.
Anyone who says that the current Olympics mark a “coming out” of China is deluding himself. China came out many-many years ago, much earlier than even the BRICs report.
Bindra’s medal does not herald India’s impending arrival on the global stage as a force to reckon with. That announcement was made many years ago by our girls winning international beauty pageants and the subsequent rivulets of foreign investment.
Bindra’s achievement is anyway not India’s achievement. The first individual gold is also a very personal triumph. As those associated with him have said, he did well because he was on his own. That “on his own” included a father who understood that shooting at inanimate targets could actually be a career, who funded his son’s pursuits in this arena, and who is building a five-star hotel at his sprawling farm.
Someone should tell Bindra Jr to savour the current glory so long as it lasts — it won’t last long, ask one Mr Rathore — and stop the hackneyed, complaining tune about cricket’s popularity. It isn’t much fun to watch a man shoot bullets over a few metres, the most dramatic movement being the pulling of the trigger. Spectator sport will always be more rewarding than a medal hunt.