PARIS — Mohit from Delhi, wrapped in the tri-coloured flag with the ancient Ashoka Chakra of growth and decay at its centre, walked toward the grandstand at the venerable stadium to cheer a team whose every move is watched by one and one-half billion pairs of eyes. It would be an important day for the world’s largest country by population, but its smallest, so far at the Paris Olympics, in terms of gold medals won.
“Why does China have sixteen gold medals already and India has none, when the two countries are about the same size?” I asked Mohit, who is an electrical engineer who had come to France to work at our host nation’s nuclear power plants.
“Is it poverty? Is it politics?” I wondered, and I have been wondering about this at multiple Olympics for the past forty years, ever since China rocketed from the rice paddies to become a sporting superpower while India achieved almost no success, metallically speaking, at all. After a week of competition in three dozen sports in Paris, Dominica, Uganda, Georgia and Kazakhstan had claimed Olympic gold, and Mongolia and Guatemala and Fiji and Kosovo each had a silver, yet elephantine India was stuck at the sad end of the table with a mere three bronze in target shooting, two of them by the same woman.
“It is not poverty, and it is not politics that holds us back,” Mohit responded. “It is the mindset. It is the focus on academics. It is the other side of the coin, that instead of sport, we want to become something better through our studies.”
Mohit remembered his father telling him, “If you play games, it will spoil you. If you study, it will make you.”
It was Sunday morning at the Stade de Colombes, the same Chariots of Fire oval that hosted the Games of the VIII Olympiad in 1924. (The stadium had since been renamed for a French rugby star who died at the age of 24 when his military training plane caught a wheel in a poplar tree.) Now the Indian hockey team was here to battle the once-imperial British in the Olympic quarterfinals on a bright blue plastic pitch.
Inside, a man from Mumbai who wanted to be identified only as Y. B. was already in the terrace, draped in the orange, white, and green. Y. B. was – guess what? – an engineer.
“Is it poverty?” I asked him. “Is it politics?”
“It is a bit of both,” Y.B. answered. “In the third and fourth-tier cities, earning the bread every month is the priority. In the bigger cities, it is a matter of spending the funding to identify the best athletes at a young age. That is the investment that we must make.”
President Narendra Modi told the International Olympic Committee last year that India will bid to host the Summer Games of 2036. The Opening Ceremony could be held, an Indian official stated, in Ahmedabad at the Narendra Modi Stadium. Or they could barge it down the Ganges.
Olympic hockey – or field hockey as it is styled in countries that know ice – once was India’s empire, just as India once was Britain’s. Before independence and before partition and before the Second World War, the Indians won Olympic gold at Amsterdam and Los Angeles and Berlin, and then, as a post-colonial eleven, repeated in London, Helsinki, Melbourne, and Tokyo. But their last championship came in 1980 at the boycotted Games in Moscow, and this, my new friend Y.B. admitted, “is an embarrassment. A big embarrassment.”
“We are letting the other countries win!” he exclaimed, and started laughing, but this was just his way of saving face.
There was at least one consolation; hockey arch-rival Pakistan did not qualify for the Paris Games at all. (Neither did Canada.) In 2021, India defeated these same Brits for the bronze medal, and the other day they beat Australia for the first time in an Olympic Games since 1972. So an atmosphere of subcontinental hopefulness hovered over the Stade de Colombes.
And it was not only in hockey on which India’s hopes were soaring, at long last, on Sunday morning. A woman named Borgohain was boxing for bronze, at least, in the 75-kilogram class. A man named Sen was facing a Dane in the badminton semifinal.
There was more. On Tuesday at the Stade de France, Neera Chopra will begin the defence of his Tokyo gold medal in javelin, and a woman named Jyothi Yarraji, a silver medalist at the most recent Asian Games, is entered in the 100-metre hurdle race that begins the following day.
“Jyothi Yarraji was 16 years old when she lifted a pen, hands trembling, to write to her elder brother Suresh, seeking his permission to do what she was ‘born to do’: run,” the Indian Express newspaper reported last week. “Suresh, she says, was so ‘protective’ and disapproving of a career in sport that Jyothi was ‘very scared’ even to hand him the note.
“The heartfelt letter Jyothi penned concluded with her pleading for one chance. I told him, ‘Give me one year. If I don’t make it, I’ll return and do whatever you tell me to do’.”
Now she is an Olympian, watched by one and one half billion pairs of eyes.
Guess what? On Sunday, boxer Borgohain got outpointed by a Chinese. Sen lost in straight sets.
Now the hockey game – this was for survival, this was for all India — began on the blue plastic pitch.
It was tied at the half, 1-1, the flag-draped crowd roaring, India shorthanded, ten players to Britain’s eleven, after one of Bharat’s men rapped a Brit in the yap and got sent off for flagrant misconduct. Shorthanded for forty full minutes – which is quite a penalty for a single infraction – the Indians held on.
With four minutes to play, a booming kick save by India’s Sreejesh Parattu on a cannonading drive from 20 yards out sent the game to a shootout.
In Olympic hockey, each man has eight seconds to bring the ball in alone and try to outmanoeuvre the keeper.
India’s first two attempts were successful. So were Britain’s. Then Britain’s Williamson fired his shot over the net, and then Raj Kumar came in and deked and waited and waited and the clock was down to two seconds and the British goalkeeper dived and as my friend Bob Cole, may he rest in peace, would say in another context: Oh, baby!