The Tokyo Olympic Games are over, and the Japanese people and government have heaved a sigh of relief that the spectacle passed without a major Covid-19 outbreak in the athletes’ village or other disasters. Here in India, the celebrations of the country’s first gold medal in the men’s javelin throw — and its best-ever medal performance at a single Olympics — have not yet subsided. But how good, really, is our best?

A decade or so ago, many spoke of India and China in the same breath. The two countries were supposedly the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western ascendancy, the Oriental response to generations of Occidental economic success. Some even spoke of “Chindia,” as if they were joined at the hip in the international imagination.

Now scroll down, past Belarus, divided Georgia, the Bahamas, and even the breakaway province of Kosovo (whose independence India does not recognise). There, in 48th place, sits India, with seven medals in all, one gold, two silver, and four bronze.

Striving for Olympic

In fact, this is not a surprise. Whereas China has systematically strived for Olympic success since it re-entered global athletic competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess.

In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Games, China embarked on “Project 119,” a government programme devised specifically to boost the country’s Olympic medal haul (the 119 refers to the number of golds awarded at the 2000 Sydney Games in such medal-laden sports as track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing, and canoeing and kayaking). Indians, by contrast, wonder if they will ever crack the magic ceiling of ten medals.

China, seeing the number of medals on offer in kayaking, decided to create a team that would master a sport hitherto unknown in the Middle Kingdom. But India has not even lobbied successfully for the inclusion in the Games of the few sports it does play well, such as kabaddi (a form of tag-team wrestling), polo, or cricket, which was played in the 1900 Olympics and never since.

Likewise, China has developed new strengths in other nontraditional sports, like shooting, while maintaining its dominance in table tennis and badminton.

Once-legendary invincibility

India, by contrast, has seen its once-legendary invincibility in field hockey fade with the introduction of artificial turf, to the point where a bronze for the men’s team in Tokyo prompted great exhilaration. When it comes to sport, forget “Chindia” — the two countries barely belong in the same sentence.

The Chinese approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down discipline. The objective was established, a programme to achieve it drawn up, the state’s considerable resources devoted to it, state-of-the-art technology acquired, and world-class coaches imported.

India, by contrast, approached the Tokyo Olympics as it had every other, with its usual combination of amiable amateurism, bureaucratic ineptitude, half-hearted experimentation, and shambolic organisation.

India's individual talent

China’s budget for preparing its athletes for the Tokyo Games alone probably exceeded India’s expenditure on all Olympic training in the last 70 years. So, whereas India produces individual excellence despite the system’s limitations, individual success in China is a product of the system. Indians excel wherever individual talent is given free rein.

The country has produced world-class computer scientists, mathematicians, biotech researchers, filmmakers, and novelists. But come up with a challenge that requires high levels of organisation, strict discipline, sophisticated equipment, systematic training, and elastic budgets, and Indians quail. Perhaps tellingly, the only Indians who have attained the title of world champion in recent years have been a billiards player and a chess grandmaster.

India’s sporting talent pool is smaller than its large population suggests; in a country of existential challenges and intense competition for every opportunity, very few feel able or inclined to devote the time needed to master a sport. The system is not designed to unearth athletic talent, and many who have it lack the health, nutrition, sporting infrastructure, and training resources required to make a global mark.