Why is India so bad at the Olympics?

"India is missing from the world’s elite athletes. But why?"  – Ken

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Transcript

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Why is India so bad at sports? It's the most populous country on earth with a billion and a half people. At the Paris Olympics, the United States won 126 medals. China, 91. India, six. And none of them gold. Less than countries like Croatia, Cuba, and Kazakhstan. Here's a fun fact: American swimmer Michael Phelps has personally won twice as many gold medals at the Olympics, 23, than India has ever won over 124 years of competition. It seems as though India is completely missing from the world's elite athletes. But why? I went in search of an answer. Was it all about economics or concentration on other sports? And as always, there are multiple reasons that give us insight not into just Indian sports, but into human motivation and how societies function. I'm Ken LaCourte, and I'll give you what I found as straightforward as I can. I'll start with making sure the question itself is fair. Is it actually true? Then take a look at the poverty excuse and see how money plays a role in sports. Then we'll look at the corruption problem, and then whether it's a government problem. We'll finish up by taking a look at family choices and how they factor into things. So let's start with the question. Is it actually true? Maybe India does better than I thought, and this is just some type of stereotype. But as I found out, it's really not. Looking at the Olympics, which is really the world stage for athletes, I could find statistic after statistic, and they would all paint a picture that would make sense for a tiny country, not one the size and the importance of India. But it's not just Olympics. Soccer, I know some of you call it football, it's the most popular game on earth, and India's never even played in a World Cup. FIFA rankings put it at 138th in the world, below Comoros, a tiny island nation I'd never heard of until I saw that ranking. Zoom out to the world's top professional leagues, and India is still barely there. No Indian citizen has ever played in the NBA, or England's Premier League, or Spain's La Liga. They just don't show up in any meaningful way on the world athletic stage, whether it's professional or amateur. Now, it wasn't always this way. They were never a powerhouse, but for 30 years, India ruled one Olympic sport, field hockey. Starting in 1928, they won six straight gold medals and eight overall. Then the sport modernized in ways that India didn't keep up with, the winds dried up, and India went 41 years without another hockey medal. So one explanation that I wanted to explore was that Indians just didn't care about sports. But that's not true either. The big exception? Cricket. Some say that it's closer to a national religion in India, with over a billion followers, and it has a hold on their culture that no other sport even comes close to. Kids play it in alleyways with a tennis ball and a plank of wood. Villages without electricity still find a way to gather around a radio or a borrowed TV when India plays. The Indian Premier League is now one of the richest sporting leagues on Earth, pulling in broadcast deals and sponsorships that rival the NFL and the English Premier League. And cricketers, they're some of the country's biggest celebrities. And there's also another sport called Kabadi, a full contact team game that's kind of a cross between tag and wrestling that's been played in Indian villages for centuries. When it launched a professional league in 2014, its first season drew 435 million viewers. And overall, India's not trying to hide from the world stage. It's actively bidding to host the Olympics in 2036. So this is a massive country with people who watch sports in numbers no other nation on earth really touches. It's got an economy that generates billions of dollars around games, and it's confident enough to invite the whole world over, but it still can't crack the top 70 of the medal table at the Olympics. So it's a puzzle, and the first thing that everyone points to is the obvious one, the poverty excuse. Now, poverty is a tricky one to talk about, if for no other reason than it's a massive, diverse country. And anyone who kind of quickly tries to explain the economy there is just undoubtedly wrong. I mean, they had the sixth largest economy in the world by GDP standards, but also so many people that it ranks 147th in the world's GDP per capita, and then substantially higher if you factor in purchasing power. So it's a complicated picture, but one area where it's been bad is childhood nutrition. A malnourished five-year-old doesn't become an Olympian at age 19, no matter how much talent he may have been born with. India's own government measures this, and the last full picture found that roughly a third of Indian children under five were stunted. Now, that doesn't mean they're a little short. Stunted is a medical threshold, a child so far beyond normal height for their age that it signals long-term malnutrition, the kind that holds back the brain and the body. Another issue is what doctors call wasting, meaning dangerously underweight for their height, the mark of a more immediate hunger problem. Now, the good news is that it's improving. The most recent survey showed stunting numbers dropping and the worst cases of wasting were falling by roughly a third. Chronic underweight has barely moved, but the overall direction is still better there, too. That shrinks the pool of potential elite athletes. Olympic athletes are built in childhood from good nutrition and good health. And for a huge share of Indian kids, that foundation is cracked before they even start training. So, despite some recent improvements, the athletes who competed in Paris were children under older, worse numbers. So whatever gains India is making now, that won't show up on the medal stand for another decade, even more. And there are also countries poorer than India that do far better at the Olympics. Kenya, it won 11 medals in Paris, four of them gold. Ethiopia won four. Uganda, one of the poorest countries on earth, won two, including a gold. And it's noteworthy that every single one of those 17 medals came in the same sport: running. It's the cheapest sport in existence. I mean, you need a road and some shoes. India certainly has that, but in the last hundred years, it's won only two track and field medals, both by the same guy. So poverty shrinks the pool, but something else is still going on. The next part of the answer isn't about what India lacks, it's about what the people running Indian sports do with the athletes they have. From the outside, Indian sports looks like it has a talent problem. But when you look closer at the talent it does have, you also start to see something else, a corruption problem. So corruption isn't a footnote in India. It's something that permeates and pulls down the entire country. It's in government, healthcare, business, education, and athletics. There's a win and any cost pressure that reaches all the way down to children, and their athletes can't trust the sports federations to protect them. For three consecutive years, India's topped the world's anti-doping agencies list of major testing nations, and by a lot. Of the urine and blood samples that India most recently tested on the world stage, 3.6% came back positive. Most serious sporting nations sit under 1%, India's multiple times that. The anti-doping agency also ran an operation called Operation Refuge, looking at children. It ranked India second in the world for doping by minors, behind only Russia. The youngest athlete sanctioned was 12 years old. You can look at that as a country desperate to win, and if they didn't get caught, it would have actually helped them. But that's always the allure and the problem with unethical behavior. It usually pays off in the short term, but in the long run, not so much. For India, the positive test results that affected the Commonwealth Games, where India's repeatedly had athletes pulled or sanctioned or medal stripped after the fact, or at the Asian Games, or on national titles. India's doping hurt its games at a level down from the Olympics that are exactly the competitions meant to build towards them. The Olympic Committee certainly noticed, and when Indian officials went to Lujan to push their bid for the 2036 Games, the IOC told them directly, clean up the doping or they wouldn't be taken seriously as a potential host. Which brings us to how these sports are actually governed in India. Here, wrestling is perhaps the clearest window. It's one of India's few real Olympic success stories with eight medals, at least one at every game since 2008. So who ran it? For more than a decade, not a former wrestler, but a sitting member of parliament. And that's not unique to wrestling. Across Indian sports, the federations have long been run by politicians and bureaucrats, not athletes. And the wrestling case shows us what that can cost. When the person picking the team owes his job to a political party, some say the best wrestler doesn't always make the mat, only the most connected. In 2023, six of the country's top female wrestlers accused the Federation president of sexual harassment. Now, he denies it, and a court will rule on the specifics, but the wrestlers protested in the streets for weeks. When the Federation held new elections, the winner was one of the president's close associates. That prompted one of the Olympic medalists, Sakshi Malik, to walk away from the sport entirely. That's a metal caliber athlete this country now has a zero chance of winning with. Every country has abusers and problems like that, but what this exposed was who holds the power when athletes needed protecting. As always, I'm working with a lot of facts here, and if I've gotten any of them wrong, let me know in the comments. I'll correct anything substantive in a pinned comment, and as always, my sources are linked in the description. Alright, so India's got a larger government problem too, and it cuts multiple ways. First, it doesn't really spend all that much on sports, and when it does spend, it doesn't do a great job. Start with the money, because India's government isn't poor. It runs a $4 trillion economy. It has a space program that landed a rover on the South Pole of the Moon, and it builds its own aircraft carriers. A country that size can spend money on sports if it wanted to. So this is about where sports rank in their list of priorities, and the answer for most of the century has been very near the bottom. In 2018, India's own sports minister stood up in Parliament and said the central government was spending about 17 U.S. cents per person per year on sports. On paper, Jamaica spent six times more per person. And the United Kingdom, 16 times more. Now, there is a caveat because comparing dollars across countries is tricky, because a dollar stretches much further in India. It buys more coaching and more staff and more court time than it would in London. And now they're starting to spend more. The most recent sports budget included the biggest jump ever, up 18% to nearly a half billion dollars. But in the same budget, the government cut funding for its own anti-doping agency and its only accredited testing lab. We don't have to guess whether money works in a situation like this. China already ran that experiment. Not that long ago, China was a much poorer country than it is today. And it made a choice. They invested in sports, sports schools that recruited kids as young as four, complete complex programs, and a program that specifically targeted sports where the rest of the world wasn't as committed, because that's where the medals were cheapest to acquire. And it worked. China went from an also ran to near the top of the medal table. And now you can say what you want about how it treats those kids, and there's a lot to say about that. But as a pure funding experiment, it proved the money argument isn't just theoretical. For decades, India did support athletes in one way, with government jobs. The army, the railways, the police, they're among the country's biggest employers of pro athletes. But that's support for athletes who are already existing in a system, not a system that gets new ones. Here's what ties all of this together. In America, the pipeline is scholastic and collegiate. A kid plays for their high school, then their university, and college sports doubles as a talent factory feeding the Olympic and pro ranks. In China, it's the state. In Europe, it's the club level. India doesn't have any of those, at least not at scale. Most schools don't have a functioning athletics program to skip class for. There's no college league feeding anything. Their federations aren't built to develop talent, they're just built to be run. Now our last answer, and the one that may impact things perhaps more than anything, is at home. It's family choices being made for kids from the beginning. There's an old Hindi saying that generations of kids grew up hearing. It translates to study and you'll become a nobleman, play and you'll be ruined. And that's the divide. Watching sports as a national pastime. Playing them for a living, that's not seen as a path to success like it is for many other countries. The schools enforce it. Whatever the official curriculum says, in most Indian schools, sports function as a break between classes, not as a subject. When exams get near, the games period is the first thing sacrificed. It's routine enough that one Indian state had to formally order its schools to stop stealing from the sports periods for extra classes. The competition that consumes Indian teenagers isn't really for a spot on a team. It's for a seat at an engineering or a medical college. I mean, entire towns exist just to cram students for those entrance exams. And that's where India's sport parent energy goes, the private coaches, the training schedules, the sacrificed weekends. A machinery exists, but it's not really aimed at sports. One official told their parliament that most athletes drop out because a sports career means high risk, uncertainty, and low rewards. So for the typical Indian family, the trade-off just isn't worth it. Families steer their kids towards school, credentials, and stable careers. And look, by most measurements of parenting, that's a good decision. Here's another data point that helps back that up. Indian Americans are among the wealthiest, best educated group in the United States. Their median household income is more than double the national average. Part of that selection, the visa system that lured most of their parents to the United States, leans hard on engineers, doctors, and academics. It's not a clean test of Indian culture on its own, but you see that in America, it's the same thing. I mean, even accounting for that, the absence of top Indian American athletes is noticeable. Five million people are in the United States with some of the best resources on earth, and there's only a handful of names, like five people over multiple decades at the Olympics. But I will say, going back to India, we can look at their exception again, cricket. Because a contract there can pay a teenager millions. And below that, there's kind of a visible ladder up, real money, even if you never become a top star. Cricket built the one thing that no other Indian sport has: a path, a career that parents can believe in. So the same families that steer kids away from other sports do push them into cricket. Indian families don't like bad bets. And for 70 years, every sport except cricket has been one. Because when a sport's career actually pays, people care. And it's interesting because there's one region in India that stands out. The state of Haryana. It pays athletes real money, roughly $720,000 for an Olympic gold, with cash prizes reaching down to fourth place and beyond, plus a government job with the medal. That region has only 2% of India's population, but now supplies about 25% of its Olympic team. To me, that's fascinating insight into human behavior. And overall for India, it's another sign that the country's sports trajectory might be ticking upwards. So malnutrition shrinks the pool of kids who can compete, and a problematic system fails many of the ones who remain, and that makes sports a bad bet. Families do what smart families do, they put their kids on the path that go somewhere, whether that's an engineering degree or maybe a cricket academy. Which means that in some ways, I'm not sure it's fair to say that India's failing at sports. A country that would rather watch cricket than fund a javelin program, I'm not sure if that's a country that made a mistake or a country that made a choice. And who's to say whether that's the right or wrong choice? Hey, I certainly learned things in putting together that and this video, and I hope you did as well. Until next time.