Manish Tewari | Why Bid For Olympics If There’s No Sports Culture?

As someone who takes an active interest in personal fitness, I have long bemoaned the lack of an active sports and a personal fitness culture in India. In the formative years of life, I used to spend an average eight to 10 hours in a swimming pool as I used to swim competitively.

The offseason was spent on weight training and other forms of intense physical exercise including long distance running as Chandigarh was too cold to swim from mid-November to mid-March as there were no indoor pools or heated pools then.

As I grew older swimming gradually got replaced by outdoor running or brisk walking and calisthenics and free hand weights, primarily because of a paucity of time.

I have been always quite struck with the fact that over the years I would encounter the same set of 40 to 50 people whichever park I would frequent in New Delhi, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Ropar or wherever else I could walk during my travels.

This is despite the fact that the populace that resides in the densely built-up urban agglomerations in and around these parks would run into at least a hundred thousand people if not more.

Contrast this with what happens in almost every other city around the world. People are running, walking and exercising at all and every hour of the day. If you happen to drive in from the airport at even 2 am in the morning you can find people running on roads and footpaths across the city.

Beyond the compulsory physical activity in schools there is a lack of a sporting culture in India that leads to a lot of avoidable lifestyle diseases, particularly a lack of stress busting physical activity that is the cause of increased heart attacks even among younger people, high blood pressure and diabetes to name but a very few. More and more young adults in their thirties and forties are dying of heart attacks than ever before.

The institutional focus on creating a culture for sports activities is lacking. Most of the villages do not have the requisite playing grounds or walking tracks where children can go and play and adults can walk or exercise.

If you travel by train that I tend to do a lot you can see some “health fanatics” even walking up and down on railway platforms in suburban India. This the clearest possible indication of the absence of any meaningful sporting infrastructure.

However, even where there is infrastructure the utilisation is minimal. This has implications on our sports performance as well. In the 2024 Paris Olympics India stood 71st in the medal tally winning just one silver and five bronze medals. India was in the august company of Lithuania that was at the 70th position, Moldova at 72nd and Kosovo at the 73rd position.

I recall at the culmination of the Montreal Olympics in 1976 Illustrated Weekly of India had a cover story that said “600 million people and not a single gold”. Five decades later the headline should have been “1.46 billion people and not a single gold”. In the 2020 Tokyo Olympics held under the overhang of Covid-19 India’s rank in the medal tally was 48th. In 2016 at the Rio Olympics India stood at 67 and in the 2012 London Olympics India stood at 57 in the medal tally. Something is fundamentally remiss in our sports strategy.

The government is planning to table and will even endeavour to try and pass the National Sports Governance Bill 2025 in the current Monsoon Session of Parliament. The bill endeavours to create a framework for good governance in the National Sports Federations (NSFs) and the Indian Olympic Association (IOA). It decrees the setting up of a regulatory board which would have the power to grant recognition and decide funding to NSFs based upon their observance of the statutory fiats pertaining to good governance. The regulatory board would also ensure compliance with the highest governance, financial and ethical standards.

The Bill also provides for institution of an Ethics and Dispute Resolution Commission, respectively, to ensure transparency in governance and cut down litigation. The government has also approved a National Sports Policy 2025.

As expected, the bill is been opposed by the sports federations who feel threatened that they would lose control over their respective sultanates. Most of the sports administrators in India perhaps have never played the game that they lord it over. The challenge of reforming sports bodies has always been very protracted. The classical case is the manner in which key recommendations of the Lodha committee pertaining to the administration of cricket have been undone over the past decade.

However, as Saint Bernard of Clair Vaux said in the 12th century, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the real issue is funding to create excellence in sports.

The Union Budget for the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports for 2025-26 is a meagre Rs 3,794.30 crores ($439.60 million). The flagship Khelo India scheme gets a paltry sum of 1,000 crores ($115.82 million). China’s sports budget for the same fiscal is eight times higher than India and stands at 27,741 crores. ($3.4 billion approximately). Though the US has no federal budget for sports, just the United States Olympics and Para-Olympics committee spent $388.5 million in 2024 out which $233.9 million was spent on promoting excellence in athletics. Needless to add that this is but a fraction of the total spending on sports in the United States. National Basket Ball Association (NBA) star Stephan Curry earned $155.8 million in 2024 while his colleague Le Bron James raked in a cool $133.7 million. Japan’s annual sports budget for 2025-26 is $57 billion approximately (36.27 billion yen).

In India, the only paying sport really is cricket. According to publicly available information, the Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI) had a revenue Rs 18,700 crores ($2.2 billion approximately) in FY 2023-24. The Indian Premier League is expected to generate Rs 20,000 crores ($2.4 billion approximately) in FY 2025-26. Much of that does not even go into nurturing grassroots talent.

Unless India does not dramatically up spending on sports across the board, both at the federal and state levels, as sports is a state subject (Entry 33 of the State list), and endeavour to create a culture of sports across the country, would there be any point in even bidding for hosting the Summer Olympics in 2036 that are still 11 years away?