Wrestling the wrong idea: Whose medals are these anyway?

Among the many rumours that abound our news cycle, came the pearl: the government was planning to officially proclaim that all medals won by athletes in any competition are in fact owned by the State, because the athletes receive state funding. This was just a rumour, perhaps like the chip in the ₹2,000 note. After all, who could possibly issue this notification and when – the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (MYAS), perhaps? Finance? Culture? It was, of course, just a whimsy -- germinated on social media/”news debates” about the protesting wrestlers saying they were going to immerse their medals in the Ganga. The wrestlers’ grievance and what that led them to want to take this drastic step became secondary. Instead, a foghorn blared: “They are not their medals to immerse.”

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Before we get to the medals, we were also told how much MYAS spent on the wrestlers for the foghorn to gain validity. Usually, MYAS’s publicly available financial documentation – how much they give federations every year, for example -- is somewhat complicated to decipher. But it could just be me because many seem to have been able to extract the exact amount spent on the wrestlers without too much difficulty, all at the same time. Good job, guys!

The “whose medals are these?” argument is in fact the quintessential Indian sarkari/sports federation theory which aims to suppress, compress and extinguish the fundamental importance and relevance of the individual athlete in Indian sport. It is hardly surprising because the majority of our athletes come from homes of very modest means, and it’s a good way to keep them in check.

Humour me, even though this is facetious: if you took whichever particular medal-winning elite athlete from the ring or the track or the field and replaced them with, say, the ministry official or federation president (or ATM machine), there’s going to be no medal coming from anywhere. No matter how many flags are waved or how loudly the anthem is sung by patriotic fans.

Now to how medals are won. The State does contribute a portion of our taxes to fund a portion of our athletes’ expenses. It has been doing so for decades. But then, outside of hockey and wrestler Khashaba Jadhav’s 1952 Helsinki bronze, why did it take India 44 years to win its next individual medal at the Olympics? And why have we begun to win multiple medals at the Olympics and world championships medals in multiple sports only in the last two decades?

Medals are won due to a combination of factors: the most irreplaceable of those is an individual’s pure athletic talent. It is the athlete who spends time, surrenders youth, sheds sweat, blood, tears, earns the scars, and like the wrestlers, is willing to turn ears into cauliflowers. That is well before any money arrives. No one pays a child and parent-coach in an Indian village to get up at 5 am every day and head out to training.

The next most critical step is the induction of expertise to build, perfect, and take that talent to its maximum limit. The expertise we are referring to comes through a combination of factors: training methods and equipment, competition-planning, sports science involvement around improvement in technique, prevention of injury, and medical intervention or rehabilitation. When used well, it is where our money goes.

Even then, we have to accept that global sport’s RoI is extremely skewed: more athletes lose than win. Sports academies are working with the knowledge that from a pool of around 100 trainees, they can hope to produce two or three top-flight elite medal-prospect champions. When these factors combine, the athlete prepares well, the stars align, and the medal arrives -- years of effort compressed into a narrow window of opportunity and slice of fortune.

What has held Indian sport back and still does in many disciplines, is how and where State money is distributed and spent. The early years of the 21st century witnessed the invention of a unique Indian enterprise, private sports bodies focussed on managing the careers of elite athletes. They were born as a response to our shoddy sporting administration.

While private financial investment into the elite athletes’ careers was minuscule compared to State funding, what they did was move the money quickly and smoothly to focus on the expertise required at the time. And to do what Indian sports federations and successive governments had not done before: put elite athletes at the front of the queue. Not surprisingly, the credit given by successful athletes to these private bodies annoyed federations and officials enormously.

They believe this was disproportionate praise when compared to the actual quantum of State support. This disgruntlement led to the creation of the government-driven schemes for elite sport, like MYAS’s Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) which works with private bodies as well. A few months after the Tokyo Olympics, a federation president complained bitterly, saying TOPS and the private bodies were “ruining athletes”. The sport – wrestling; the president -- Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.

Those fiercely protective about public funding for athletes should also be aware that our taxes pay for the travel and daily expenses of the large posse of superfluous officials that travel to some of these mega sporting events. Not the coaches, trainers, psychologists, logistics, media mangers. People like, let’s say, the heads of national sporting federations.

There are millions of hours of deep involvement and commitment that precede a sporting medal. To believe a champion athlete is the end result of funding is like expecting everyone with a driving licence to finish on an F1 podium. I know this is not a nuanced argument but neither is the claim that our athletes do not own their medals because the State has funded them.

India’s obsession with mega-event medals, particularly the Olympics, is our most privileged lazy habit that equates sporting medals with national self-esteem. To dispute that the wrestlers’ medals belong to them, and even start rumours of a proposed notification, are only arguments made by those who understand neither sport nor athletes.

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