Why are Indians so bad in sports?
http://insider.espn.go.com/insider/story?id=1682851&contentType=insider
None In A Billion
By Zev Borow
ESPN The Magazine
Monday, December 8
This story appears in the latest edition of ESPN The Magazine, on newstands this week. As an Insider, you get the best of both words: Early access to Magazine stories online, plus The Magazine itself delivered to your mailbox.
No one is sure how many people live in India. Mention you’re headed that way and you’ll hear something like, “Wow, India. There’s like a billion people there, right?” You nod; sounds right. The Indians you meet once you’re there aren’t any more exact. A guy at the crazy soccer match in Calcutta says, “800 million, max”; another guy at the camel races in Rajasthan says, “a billion flat, give or take a few hundred million.” Sounds reasonable, until you consider that there aren’t very many places on the planet where you can give or take a few hundred million people. The United States, give or take a few hundred million, is either empty or twice as crowded.
But that’s India, a place where numbers, and most everything else, can make your head spin. From 20 million or so temples to 3 million or so Hindu gods; from hundreds of millions of desperate poor people to hundreds of thousands of free-ranging cows; whatever you count, big numbers abound. But there are much smaller numbers, more precise and no less bewildering, especially to sports fans. Olympic medals won by India: 16. Medals won at the 2000 Games: 1 (bronze, women’s weightlifting). And here’s a round number for you: Indian athletes most Americans could name on Jeopardy! if the category were Indian Athletes You’ve Heard of Even Once: 0.
A billion people, and one bronze medal? A billion people, and no Indian center in the NBA? Clearly, if George Steinbrenner owned India, the pitching coach would have been fired decades ago, not to mention several prime ministers. Which begs a question: Does the second-most populous nation on earth play anything well? Because if Asia is NEXT, you have to wonder what’s next for India.
It takes 21 hours to fly from New York to New Delhi, a trip sure to leave you hallucinating. Still, on my first day in-country in late October, I think I’ve found my way to the offices of Sharda Ugra, a sports writer for the newsweekly India Today. Ugra, a longtime critic of Indian sports, shakes her head at my presence: “All the way from America to find out why we’re so inept?” She cites a study showing that the best-performing country at the 2000 Sydney Olympics was Barbados, which won a lone bronze (Obadele Thompson, men’s 100-meter sprint) but has only 2.7 million people. Worst performer? India. Ugra ticks off a few reasons that account for much of India’s sports futility: poor facilities, weak coaching, government mismanagement. “We are a country that loves to watch high-quality sport,” she says, “but our system does not produce world-class athletes.” She mentions China. “There is no effort to harness sporting talent here. The Chinese system has a dark side, but some of it makes sense.”
You don’t often hear people speak wistfully about the Chinese system. Then again, you don’t often hear people lamenting parents who put too much emphasis on education and not enough on sports. Unless you’re in India.
“Most parents here view sports as a waste of time,” says Vece Paes, father of Leander Paes. Leander, who won the 1999 men’s doubles titles at the French Open and Wimbledon – with countryman Mahesh Bhupathi – can stake a legitimate claim to being India’s most famous jock. (Yeah, exactly.) “Parents don’t see sports as a way to earn a living,” Vece says. “They say, ‘Play sports and you’ll wind up begging on the street.’” With more than 25 percent of Indians living below the UN poverty line, you see their point. India may be the world’s biggest democracy, but for 800 million of its people (give or take), the daily quest to survive is truly the only struggle that matters. As for the 200 million-strong middle class: “We are not a sporting nation,” says Paes, a former Olympic field hockey player. “We don’t go out on weekends to play or ski. We’re brought up to be cerebral, not with an aggressive manner. That way is seen as immodest, un-Indian.”
Contd.