What it takes to win

What does Olympic success or lack of it say about the state of your country? Rather a lot, if the reaction of many of the nations competing in the Games that have just passed is any gauge.

Even before the London Games were half way through, the processes of revelling in or agonising over performances by national teams were well under way.

In Britain, news programmes were so full of the “historic” achievements and “Olympic glory” of their hugely successful team — in everything from the gruelling heptathlon to tennis — that there was barely time for a mention of the performances of other nations in the Games, let alone other news.

At the other end of the spectrum, commentators in Australia (which had been aiming for 46 medals) and Germany (which had been aiming for 86 medals and 26 Gold) have been lambasting and bemoaning the performances of their teams, seemingly well off the levels they’d grown accustomed to.

INSTITUTIONAL FACTORS

The fact that, even post Cold War, nations continue to see Olympic performance as a proxy for something beyond their sporting prowess may not be surprising.

Research conducted over the years has shown clear links between Olympic success and a nation’s economic well-being, as well as its social structures.

Ahead of the recent Games, two economists at Goldman Sachs analysed past performances of nations against a number of variables, concluding that there was indeed a strong link between income per capita and performance, as well as a number of other institutional and structural factors — a combination that tended to favour developed nations.

“Gold does go where growth and the growth environment are the best,” they concluded.

The bank also noted that more than half of all Olympic medals are now won by emerging markets, reflecting their rising prominence, dominating sports such as weightlifting, boxing and wrestling, while rising up the ranks of less obvious sports such as diving and gymnastics.

Other factors come into play of course: Britain’s decision to begin pumping money into sport largely through funding from the National Lottery (but also the public funds) following a disappointing performance in the 1996 Atlanta Games (it won 14 medals, including just 1 gold) paid off immediately.

After putting £60 million (Rs 520 crore) into preparations for the 2000 Sydney Games, the nation won a total of 28 medals, 11 of which were gold.

Both spending and performance have continued to rise since: with the whopping £235 million (Rs 2,040 crore) spent by UK Sport ahead of the Beijing Games yielding 47 medals and 19 Golds.

The £264 million (Rs 2,300 crore) spent in the run-up to the home Games, translate into £4.25 million a medal, at the time of writing, (Rs 37 crore) — a figure unlikely to be sustainable in the long term, even with the lottery support.

Others such as China’s well-ordered system of identifying talent right from the rural and neighbourhood levels, followed by rigorous training schemes, has also paid off to remarkable effect.

MEANING OF SUCCESS

And being a future, current and past host can be a boost too.

“The trajectory is some uplift when you win the Games, peaking at the time of the Games, and then a legacy effect because of the sporting systems you have in place, though it eventually comes down,” says David Forrest, a professor of economics at Salford Business School in the UK, who heads a research group, that like Goldman Sachs makes Olympic forecasts.

He argues that Australia’s perceived underperformance is just a case of a nation returning to the more GDP and population related levels one might expect, off the high of the Sydney Games in 2000.

He argues that another factor skewing the strong GDP/population correlation is political system. “Communist countries have systematically done far better than their GDP would suggest,” he says.

He notes that even now there is a clear distinction between former Soviet bloc nations that have clearly embraced the Western European model (such as Poland) and those that haven’t (such as Kazakhstan, Belarus, or even Ukraine).

Of course, this points to the danger in over-hyping the results: few would want to draw positive conclusions from the performance of teams such as Belarus, a country whose political system has been described as “incompatible with the concept of human rights,” by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

The political — propaganda-like — purposes that Olympics are often put to can also be highly suspect, even in full-fledged democracies.

“Politicians look to it as a form of redemption, and hope that the shine of Gold medals rubs off on them,” says Stefan Szymanski, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan.

SOBERING FACTS

Neither does Olympic success necessarily point to an egalitarian system for spotting the best talent: the high number of medals won by British athletes who attended elite education institutions has not gone unnoticed here, somewhat belying the government’s attempts to project Olympic success as something that would awaken a whole generation of new athletes.

At the same time, while it may not be appropriate to see Olympic greatness as a mark of a great, wealthy, egalitarian, democratic nation, it is the reverse situation that may tell us a lot more.

“Why do 10 million Indians win less than one hundredth of one Olympic medal, while 10 million Uzbeks won 4.7 Olympic medals,” asked academics Anirudh Krishna and Eric Haglund in a paper published in The Economic and Political Weekly back in 2008, examining the impact of a number of other factors, including life expectancy, primary school enrolment, and urban versus rural populations. (India has won a grand total of 23 Olympic medals over the years, and has the lowest number of medals per capita of 74 nations ranked by medalspercapita.com)

It is not the size of one’s population that matters, but the size of the “effectively participating population” they argue, with countries where opportunity is far less widely distributed having far lower rates of such participation.

“Giving the population opportunities to participate — and public information about these opportunities to participate — is essential for bringing a larger fraction of a country’s talent pool to light.”

India’s failure to make it towards the top of the medal table may be unimportant — allocating the eye-wateringly high levels of funding that some nations have put in would be highly inappropriate.

It is our stubbornly low position on the medals table — reflecting the limited opportunities to participate in not just sports but in so much else — that is the elephant we must contend with.

( >blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )