Athletics is the showpiece event of any Olympic Games. The sport logs the highest attendance at the Olympics, attracts the largest television audience around the world and offers the maximum number of gold medals: 47. Naturally, any country which has a healthy athletics tradition looks forward to a track and field medal. Independent India has waited for that medal since the 1948 London Games; in vain, one might add. Can Rio be any different? Where does India stand in world athletics? Though optimism is never lacking in an Olympic year, we have to see whether India has genuine medal contenders in athletics before talking of winning. As long jumper Anju Bobby George (India’s lone World Championship medallist in athletics) once pointed out to this correspondent, to be among medal contenders in a global meet, one has to first get into the top six or eight in an event in the world and then the top four closer to the championships. When an athlete gets invited to the lucrative Diamond League meetings, the prize money circuit under the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) banner, it is an indication that the country has an athlete who is rated high. Such invitations are rare for Indians nowadays.
A look at the entry standards for Rio will also bring Indian athletics into perspective. These standards are tough indeed, but have we kept pace through the years? In 22 of the 43 events (excluding four relays) the Olympic entry standards are stiffer than Indian national records. Numbers have become important in this four-yearly exercise of qualification. The National Federation (AFI) is happy if more numbers are shown as “qualified”. The Sports Authority of India (SAI) is keen that India should enter a bigger squad than 2012.
Ultimately, athletes fulfil their ambition by reaching a standard. The ‘Olympian’ tag matters more than anything else to many. Faced with superior opposition in Olympics or World Championships, these athletes have no further motivation to push their limits, to try and gain entry into the final, if not attempt a medal. When you look back you realise how tough it is to even make the final in an Olympics. From the 1948 London Games, there have only been nine Indian athletes in the finals (excluding relays). Two of them, Milkha Singh in 400m in the 1960 Rome Olympics, and PT Usha in 400m hurdles in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, finished close to a medal, both in fourth place. Singh was one-tenth of a second too late, Usha one-hundredth of a second. Usha was the last Indian athlete to make a track final, 32 years ago. In London four years ago, two discus throwers, Krishna Poonia (7th) and Vikas Gowda (8th) made the final from a batch of 14 athletes. In Beijing in 2008, no one made the final.
There is such a huge gap between performances at home and in the Olympic games that one wonders what could be contributing to this slide. The Sydney Olympics in 2000 was a classic example, where all the hype generated at home ended with a whimper at the games. Twenty nine Indian athletes went to Sydney, with four national records behind them that season. Only quarter-miler KM Beenamol crossed the first hurdle, reaching the finals. The others faded away in the preliminary round, miles behind the marks they achieved at home. Last year, woman steeplechaser Lalita Babar and shot putter Inderjeet Singh were within the top-20 and top-25 bracket, respectively, in the world rankings. Babar finished a creditable eighth in the World Championships while Inderjeet, a strapping 6’ 5” 28-year-old from Punjab, came 11th. Both had talked about aiming for medals in Olympics at some point following their qualification. Both have shown a slump in recent form. Making the final at Rio would be creditable for these two.
Are our athletes peaking too early in order to attain qualification standards and in the process denying themselves the chance to peak on the big stage? Are faulty training methods leading to this disparity in performance at home and in global meets? Or is it a matter of doping doing the job at home and the same wearing off too early to be effective at major competitions (that have stricter doping control)?
Despite the oft-repeated, worn-out slogan of ‘zero tolerance’ towards doping, there has been no serious attempt to check this menace. The efforts put in by the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) seem to have become too predictable to cause any anxiety to anyone.
Each time junior athletics has shown promise, the spectre of doping has struck a discordant note. Between 2012 and 2014, several talented youngsters, mostly male throwers, were caught doping, and though some of them have returned to the mainstream after serving bans, the precious years lost can never be restored to them.
It is only in the wake of a series of stunning doping revelations involving Russia that the Government has issued an advisory recently that Indian teams and individual athletes may be asked to stay away from countries tainted by doping. Russia, Italy, Ukraine and Georgia were reportedly mentioned in the communication issued to National federations.
The attempts to dismiss the trend of doping in Indian athletics by arguing that the numbers are mostly contributed by junior athletes and lower-rung, departmental athletes would only lead to more problems, disappointments, embarrassment and finally isolation. Russia is learning this the hard way.
K P Mohan is a former Athletics Correspondent for The Hindu