The world is getting ready for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris which starts later this month. As a young boy growing up in post-independence India, I had a sincere wish to see my country gain prominence on the world stage and to see Indian athletes succeed in international sports. The 1960 Rome Olympics was the first Olympics I followed closely. Milkha Singh, who was the favourite to win a medal in the 400 m race, and the Indian hockey team that had completely dominated in earlier Olympics, were my idols.

Unfortunately, Milkha came in fourth and the Indian hockey team was defeated by Pakistan in the finals. The exercise of rooting for India in the Olympics then became a source of utter frustration. India had won only one medal in each Olympic until 2008 except the years 1900 and 1952 when she won two. India won three medals in 2008, six in 2012, two in 2016 and seven in the 2021 games in Tokyo. I also followed Indian players in tennis and soccer. Ramanathan Krishnan was a world-class tennis star who made it to the Wimbledon semi-final two years in a row, in 1960 and 1961, but no other player from India made it to the singles semi of a major tournament. India performed well in soccer in the Asian Games of 1962, winning the gold medal and qualified to play in the 1960 Olympics.

Advertisement

The Olympic team won one match and tied another. That was the extent of their success. India never even qualified to play in the Olympics again and has once won a bronze medal in the Asian games. My father took me with him to watch the third cricket Test between India and the West Indies during the 1958-59 series at the Eden Gardens. Unfortunately, the performance of Indian players in cricket was no different from that in other sports. What we watched could only be called a total annihilation of the Indian team. India lost by an innings and 336 runs. I was nonetheless fascinated by the game.

It was called a gentleman’s game. It was played during winter with crisp weather and pleasantly warm sunshine. There was no physical struggle or sweating involved. No one was in a hurry. There were plenty of breaks including time for lunch, tea and drinks. The whole environment was peaceful. I went to see Test matches whenever my father managed to get tickets. However, my career as a cricket fan was as frustrating as following India’s performance in other sports. India never won any Test series while I was keeping score and never won a Test in a foreign country except New Zealand until that time. There was a dramatic change in the evolution of Indian cricket though.

In 1971 (ironically only a few months after I came to the USA) India won for the first time on English soil. That victory was a watershed moment. India became a different team afterwards. A new hero emerged during the preceding West Indian tour – Sunil Gavaskar. Scoring a test century was like a walk in the park for him! I kept track of all the changes taking place in the game: use of helmets by batsmen, colourful outfits with logos of sponsoring companies, introduction of one-day cricket, increase in the number of Test matches and other tournaments, and emergence of new countries in the arena. India gradually became a dominant force in the game with hundreds of millions of cheering fans. The success of Gavaskar was followed by that of Sachin Tendulkar who became an embodiment of the game itself. He broke almost all batting records including the number of Test centuries and number of runs in test cricket.

Many other players, including Kapil Dev, M S Dhoni and Virat Kohli have gained international fame. Popularity of cricket in India has a positive spiralling effect; it generates profit which in turn leads to investments in developing better players who enhance the performance of the team even more. The victory in the 2024 T20 World Cup is the latest testament to that success story. The contrast between excellence of India in cricket and poor performance in other sports is striking. Unlike cricket, India’s performance in other sports has not improved much over my lifetime. What are the reasons? Is financial investment the answer? There is no question that the game of cricket has become a big business in India with plenty of opportunities for the teamowners to make profit; a portion of that profit is fed back to recruit and groom new players.

In Western countries, especially in the USA, the athletes in most sports are developed in college programmes. The cost of maintaining such programmes is huge and includes mega annual salaries of successful coaches, travel expenses and construction of infrastructure. India understandably does not have expensive college athletic programmes to train students in various sports. For the government it is not a high priority to develop worldclass athletes when there are dozens of much more pressing needs in improving the economy, education, housing, infrastructure etc. The private sector probably does not see opportunities for return on investment in most sports. Can such investment improve performances of Indian players in sports like tennis, swimming and soccer if not track and field events? I would like to argue that the answer is “no”! There might be a more subtle reason for our superiority in cricket.

Indian athletes have probably performed poorly in the Olympics and other sports simply because of their fundamental inadequacies in physical strength and perseverance compared to athletes from other countries. The reason may be related to genetics, nutrition and climate and it is doubtful that a huge amount of financial investment would bring them on par with Western and some Asian athletes. Cricket is different. It is not a game of physical strength. It is a game of art. For a batsman all the strokes – late cuts, glances, hooks, square drives and so on – are results of very delicate movements of the wrists and arms as opposed to brute force. The idea is to change the trajectory of the ball with minimum physical effort. Same is true for bowlers. The way a bowler delivers a ball by moving his arm over his head and holding the seam in various ways has a complex effect on the movement of the ball after it leaves his hand.

Such artful skill and finesse combined with a leisurely environment are perfectly suited to the Indian temperament. This may be what the Indians have mastered, and why they excel over other teams with stronger players. The 1950s and 60s were just the time needed to develop these skills to the fullest. Indian players are performing very well in the game of badminton but not in tennis, again because tennis requires physical strength, but badminton involves more delicate movements. It is the same tactful movement of wrists and arms that allowed India to be on top of the world in field hockey for many years, but then other countries caught up on this art. Same thing can happen in cricket too. However, the sports powerhouses in the world seem to have little interest in cricket and India’s dominance in cricket is likely to continue. In any event, I will forget the past disappointments and again root for Indian athletes in Paris and hope that India’s medal count reaches double digits.

(The writer, a physicist who worked in industry and academia, is a Bengali settled in America.)