Level playing fields

Thomas Cup winners stand on shoulders of giants

India’s historic maiden Thomas Cup badminton title reflects the gradual expansion of sporting opportunity in India beyond the national mania for cricket. Together with boxing, wrestling, athletics, and hockey, the growing trend of successes of women and men in global sporting arenas has been slow but steady, an indication of the emerging financial eco-system to underwrite the pursuit of sports as a profession outside of the old government-defence forces-public sector complex. The four young men who made up the team that beat favourite Indonesia 3-0 in Bangkok on Sunday are a striking representation of this new development. All four literally stand on the shoulders of giants, in this case Prakash Padukone, former world no 1, and Pullela Gopichand, former world number 5 and current chief national coach.

Both stalwarts set up badminton academies, which have reliably churned out champions. Lakshya Sen, former world junior number one, trained at the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy. Kidambi Srikanth, former world number one, and doubles partners Chirag Shetty and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, the first Indian men’s pair to be ranked inside the Badminton World Federation top ten, all trained at the Gopichand academy. India’s two most successful women badminton players, Saina Nehwal and P V Sindhu, also trained there. It was, in fact, their early successes that generated the momentum for the creation of world-class public infrastructure for badminton — the Gachibowli stadium in Hyderabad, set up by the Telangana sport authority, being a case in point.

Though these successes deserve to be feted in the most celebratory terms, they also indirectly reflect the limited access to opportunity that could transform the country’s sporadic successes into some sort of steady state of sporting achievement. It is noteworthy, for instance, that all these badminton players come from middle-class homes that have a degree of wherewithal to support their children’s achievements. Outside of cricket, where the exponential expansion of the market for talent thanks to the Indian Premier League (IPL) has altered the social dynamics of the sport, access to sporting infrastructure remains limited in India. Yet several Indian champions have shown that there is no shortage of sporting talent in all social strata. Indian Olympic gold medallist Neeraj Chopra, boxing bronze medallist Lovlina Borgohain, weightlifting silver medallist Mirabai Chanu, and wrestling bronze medallist Sakshi Malik all come from poor to modest backgrounds and overcame huge social and economic odds. Ms Chanu, for instance, had to rely on long-distance truckers to transport her to her practice sessions.

Though these individual biographies make for great motivational stories they also reflect exceptionalism. The private sector, which has emerged as an alternative to earlier public funding, tends to loosen the purse-strings only after medal successes, a chicken-and-egg conundrum for Indian athletes of modest means. The real transformation will come when Indians irrespective of their social and economic background can access a network of private-public sporting infrastructure and support system so that the country can celebrate sometime in the future, say, a Dalit badminton or tennis champion. The IPL and Indian Hockey Federation have demonstrated the workability of two such models. But India needs the same sort of institutional ecosystem in many more sporting fields.