India's New Sports Quotient

The ongoing Asian Games puts the spotlight on India's rapidly evolving sports quotient, previously skewed by cricket. EPISODE #146

Dear Reader,

A very Happy Monday to you.

Last week India logged a sporting milestone—crossing a record 107 medals at the just concluded Asian Games in Hangzhou, China. It was the first time that Indian athletes topped one hundred medals at the Asian Games.

This is more than just a record. It is part of a new and welcome trend in Indian sport: At every international event, a new athlete, a new sport brings India glory. Slowly and steadily it is reworking the national sports quotient—skewed heavily in favour of cricket.

So, this week I explore the how and why of this record. Do read and share your feedback. Hit the like button if it strikes a chord. Thank you.

A big shoutout to SKS, Surendra, Premasundaran, Rajit, Gautam, Vandana and Ranjini for your informed responses, kind appreciation and amplification of last week’s column. Once again, grateful for the conversation initiated by all you readers. Gratitude also to all those who responded on Twitter and Linkedin. 

The cover picture, a collage of medal winners at the Asian Games capturing the diversity of India’s new found sporting prowess, is sourced from Twitter.

Unfortunately, Twitter has disabled amplification of Substack links—perils of social media monopolies operating in a walled garden framework. I would be grateful therefore if you could spread the word. Nothing to beat the word of mouth.

Reader participation and amplification is key to growing this newsletter community. And, many thanks to readers who hit the like button😊.

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Bleeding Blue

On Saturday India signed off with a record 107 medals at the Asian Games held in Hangzhou, China. It was the first time that Indian athletes topped 100 medals at the Asian Games.

In fact, it improved upon the 101 medals won by India in the Commonwealth Games it hosted in 2010. I believe 2010 was the tipping point in the evolution of modern Indian sport—the point when there was a unprecedented and happy convergence of circumstances.

While you can never really compare performances by weighing it in terms of medals, but the fact that Indian athletes pulled off the Asiad achievement away from the comfort of home—and in quasi-hostile conditions with officials ruling arbitrarily—makes this win even more significant.

As the cover photograph, a collage of the medal winners, shows, India’s outstanding performance was across sports. This is particularly significant, given that the country’s calling card in global sports has been dominated by cricket. To me this is one big takeaway from the outstanding performance of our sportspersons.

The obvious question to ask is that is this a flash in the pan? Did it happen by chance? Or is there a method in the performance?

Origins

As a budding sports reporter, I still vividly recall my conversation with Eric Arnold, the Australian coach of India’s swimming team for the 1986 Asian Games in Seoul. Waiting for the bus to transport the swimmers to the Talkatora Swimming complex for the morning routine, Arnold venting about the inadequate sports facilities provided for all athletes in general and the swimmers in particular.

To make his point he opened his palm and showed me a bunch of vitamin tablets: “This is the quota for the entire team.” Implicit in his statement was that the vitamins would have to be rationed—some swimmers will have to go without their much needed supplements.

I remember hanging out with the team in the mess and don’t recall any specific or customised diet regimen for the swimmers. For Arnold, this must have been a culture shock, since Australia by then was already a global swimming power house—helped along no doubt by the scientific training and large resources.

Given this back drop, it would have been an extra source of satisfaction for the Australian coach, when his ward, the talented Khazan Singh, won the silver medal in the 200 m butterfly—ending a more than three-decade medal drought for India in swimming. Sheer talent overcame the odds.

The tragic takeaway from this episode is that Indian athletes did well despite the pathetic state of the sports administrative system—hollowed by corruption and designed for failure.

Any medals that India won was because immense talent and determination overcame the handicaps posed by official neglect. It is like competing with a weight tied to your legs.

Course Correction

The Indian Women’s Kabbadi team after winning their gold medal in Asiad 23

With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that there was a happy convergence of circumstances—eyeballs, economic circumstances, information, electronic media and the consumer economy—beginning in the 1990s, which gradually chipped away at the legacy deficit.

This process began with the unshackling of the Indian economy initiated in the 1980s and started acquiring critical mass when the country finally buried the Licence Raj in 1991.

Over these two decades Indian private sector started to breathe. This is apparent from the fact that this period seeded a generation of corporate champions like Airtel, Infosys and so on. They, in turn, reordered the industrial map of the country by displacing the previous leaders built around industries like textiles and licensed sectors like automobiles.

Another big development that aided this process of transformation was the decision to allow private sector—including foreign entities—into television. This created the space for showcasing niche like sports.

More importantly, this rise of electronic media provided million of eyeballs and sowed the seeds of the consumer economy—till then the middle class had to contend with mediocre home grown or smuggled rip offs or expensive imports via returning relatives.

This happy combination laid the foundations for lucrative sponsorships in the future. Frankly, we have to thank Indian cricket, the gorilla in the room of Indian sport, for accelerating this process. The arrival of Sachin Tendulkar, probably the greatest cricketer alive, worked like magic for popularising cricket. Combined with tech it provided unprecedented eyeballs—the holy grail for sponsors.

It was not long before corporates were scrambling to underwrite this success. The subsequent birth of the Indian Premier League, considered to be among the most lucrative sports leagues in the world, is a manifestation of this phenomenon.

Coincidentally, this was also the moment when the likes of Geet Sethi, already an established global name in billiards, and Prakash Padukone (the first all-England badminton champion from India) made it to the national team—unlike most of their team members, neither Sethi nor Padukone lacked resources and hence were quick to notice the lack of facilities provided for the team.

They, and others like them, banded together to form non-sports organisations like OlympicGoldQuest, to provide the basics: “24×7 presence of support staff that include, physiotherapists, dietitians, mental trainers, coaches, injury management experts and logistic managers around them to look after all their training needs and to instill in them a sense of pride and confidence.”

Undoubtedly, all these trends pulled together worked to transform Indian sport. Not only did it tap the abundant talent in India, which otherwise often got buried (recall the stories about our medal winners being reduced to penury), but it also stirred the pot as it were: Creating the basis for a multi-sport nation; as opposed to having a sole global calling card around cricket.

Not surprising then that the business of Indian sport, according to GroupM which tracks this number, has grown at an annual compound growth rate of 14% to a staggering Rs14,209 crore in 10 years ended 2022.

Multi-sport Nation

Clearly, the success at Hangzhou was no flash in the pan. It was preceded by a series of world class performances. To cite a few:

• A first gold medal in track and field at the Olympics in 2021;

• First ever win at the Thomas Cup (unofficial world championship) for badminton in 2022;

• Podium finish in sports like steeplechase, lawn bowls.

As they say success breeds success.

Growing up I recall how anyone with a greater aptitude for sports was dubbed as a “sports case”—used as a pejorative. Parents would discourage their wards from pursuing a career in sports. Wonder how many world class sportspersons India lost in the first six decades?

The good news is that today this is no longer the case. People take a career in sports as seriously as grooming their wards to take competitive exams to get into a degree course in engineering etc and later into the civil services. If you have talent, you have hope—previously this was improbable.

To me this is the big message that comes out of India’s stupendous performance at Hangzhou.

Soak the moment.

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Recommended Viewing/Reading

Sharing the latest post of Capital Calculus on StratNews Global.

A few weeks ago, the JP Morgan Bond Index added India—the last big emerging market—to the index. The proposal in the works for nearly a decade, is seen as a vote of confidence in India.

It is akin to a stock being included in the Sensex or Nifty-50—making it an automatic favourite with investors. The JP Morgan Bond Index is one of the three big global debt funds and has an estimated corpus of around $230 billion.

Given that the Indian market has been accorded a weight of 10 percent in the index, this would mean that the country can eventually expect about $23 billion inflows into a certain class of government securities. Given that this inclusion will trigger a demonstrative effect with other debt funds, India can expect larger inflows.

To unpack the macroeconomic implications of this development we spoke to Saugata Bhattacharya, Senior Vice President at Axis Bank and a keen observer of the Indian economy.

Sharing the link below. Do share your thoughts.

Till we meet again next week, stay safe.