 "Sakshi Malik poses with her bronze medal for the women's wrestling freestyle 58-kg competition during the medals ceremony at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil")
In the week running up to the Rio Olympics, JSW Sports - the sports division of the JSW Group - ran a two-minute long ad film. Titled "Rukna Nahi Hai", it featured 12 Indian athletes, including Narsingh Yadav, Lalita Babar and Babita Kumari. Compassionate and unfailingly spine-tingling, this was an unfeigned attempt by JSW to pay tribute to the athletes it had so carefully nurtured and moulded into earnest specimens capable of taking on the world.
On Wednesday evening, Hall 3 of the Olympic Training Centre in Rio was witness to unbridled Indian joy. And, one of JSW's very own was at the centre of it. As most of the country slept the night rather ignorantly, Sakshi Malik, grinning insuppressibly, stepped up on the podium to collect the bronze medal she had won in the women's 58 kg freestyle wrestling. Tricolour in hand, an emotionally-sapped Malik later thanked her coaches and India's Olympic ambassadors. A special thank you, however, was reserved for JSW, without whom, she said, this would just not have been possible. Hours later, she updated her Facebook status with #ruknanahihai.
Trust P V Sindhu - if she is able to summon that disloyal streak of imperiousness against Spain's Carolina Marin in the Olympic badminton gold medal match - to do the same. Just this time, the gleeful recipient of that recognition will be Mumbai-based Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ), and not JSW. Sindhu, earlier this year, spoke how about OGQ had shown faith in her when she was all of 14. At the time, Sindhu had no world ranking, no tournament wins, and definitely no Olympic medals.
For Malik and Sindhu, OGQ and JSW have been constant companions, in both victory and defeat. Without them, as Sindhu would also willingly acknowledge, an Olympic medal would have forever remained a distant reality. In some ways, sports excellence programmes in India have succeeded where governments have miserably failed.
Shrewd intervention coupled with a structural outlook - a fruitful recipe that has steadily bolstered the number of Indian athletes at major international events. Medal hauls may still be paltry but athletes reaching qualifying marks have gone up, as the Rio Olympics have shown, where India is fielding its largest-ever contingent of athletes.
Organisations such as JSW, OGQ, Bengaluru-based GoSports Foundation- which supports shuttler Kidambi Srikanth and table-tennis player Soumyajit Ghosh - and the Anglian Medal Hunt Company in Delhi seem convinced that recognising young talent early and training them independently -with almost no state support- is the only way to wake up a country from its sporting slumber.
PV Sindhu
As Viren Rasquinha, who heads OGQ, explains: "We try to do the best we can for athletes. We don't promise medals but we make sure that all their requirements are fulfiled: equipment, coaching, diet, training. We leave no stone unturned." On Thursday evening, after Sindhu's emphatic win over Japan's Nozomi Okuhara in the Olympic semi-final, a teary-eyed Rasquinha posted a picture alongside the shuttler, proudly letting the world know that he had been supporting her since she was 14.
With no surety of return on the investment made - which can run into millions - perhaps that's the kind of unrestrained happiness that keeps people like Rasquinha going.
Mustafa Ghouse, CEO of JSW Sports, says that performances such as Malik's make all the effort worthwhile. "It is such a huge achievement. And, we're glad that we've been a part of it. These are the kind of things we wait for. Moreover, this is so important for the entire Indian Olympic contingent."
For a country that has the worst Olympic record in terms of medal per head, it is unfortunate that it has been left to a handful of not-for-profit companies to spawn a proper winning culture.
Soon after its inception in 2001, OGQ's two founders, Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone, wanted to build a corpus and use only the interest part. But over the years, they haven't been able to do that, spending instead whatever amount of funds they've been able to raise. "There has to be a change in the way we look at sports. We need more people to be helping athletes and not approach sports as if its some frivolous indulgence," says Delhi-based businessman Vikas Mehra, who over the years has donated to a number of organisations supporting Indian athletes. "I was giving away Rs 5 lakh a year. But we need so many more people. Our goal should be to make this a mass movement."
Despite the somewhat limited funds at their disposal, the results produced by these not-for-profit organisations have been spellbinding. GoSports Foundation, which supplies for a large number of young athletes, raises about Rs 70 lakh every year - a puny fraction of the Rs 1,592 crore set aside for sports during this year's Union Budget.
Srikanth, one of the athletes supported by GoSports, is now firmly a part of the top 10 in the world in men's badminton. That he has also trained under the aegis of master mentor Pullela Gopichand shouldn't be discounted either. Of the six athletes who won medals at the London Games four years ago, for example, four were represented by OGQ.
In 2013, OGQ helped send luger Shiva Keshavan to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics by raising money through crowd-funding - a new innovative method at the time aimed at enabling every Indian to donate money.
Stories such as Keshavan's, however, make a few others question the kind of support extended by the government to its athletes. Unlike China, rigorous state-sponsored sporting programmes may be beyond India but there surely must be more that can be done, athletes argue.
"GoSports and JSW are doing what the central and state governments should be doing. If they can produce Olympic medallists with limited funds, then the state can do much more," says a former Olympian, on the condition of anonymity. "It all comes down to will."
Meanwhile, organisations such as OGQ soldier on undeterred. Even as Rio grinds to a largely unfulfilling halt, India's only consolation takeaway has been the unprecedented number of athletes it has managed to train and make Olympic-ready. Without timely intervention by certain strong-willed organisations led by impassioned individuals, that number would have been vastly different. Across boardrooms at OGQ, GoSports and JSW, it wouldn't be wrong to assume that preparations for Tokyo 2020 are already under way.
