In less than 12 hours from now, the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games’ opening ceremony will get underway. A quick browse through the official website of the Rio Games will tell you that around 10,500 athletes from 205 countries will be competing in 306 events across 42 sporting disciplines at 37 different venues for 136 women, 161 men and nine mixed medals up for grabs over 19 days of the biggest sporting carnival in the world. Eye-popping numbers those, by any stretch of the imagination.
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The United Nations General Assembly, widely considered as the largest congregation of countries, saw attendance from 193 member countries in its 70th session held last year. That is how big the Summer Olympics are.
This author’s tryst with the quadrennial sporting extravaganza began with the 1984 Los Angeles (LA) Games. Those were the days when the Soviet Union existed and today’s Germany did not. And China was not a factor to be worried about. The likes of Carl Lewis, Sebastian Coe, Mary Lou Retton, Michael Gross and Edwin Moses were the everlasting images of those games.
As an Indian sports fan, while the celebration of sport was something which excited you - deep down you would be left feeling morose at not being even present on the medals tally. It got worse at the 1988 Seoul Games when you saw Anthony Nesty of Suriname, a country of about 300,000 people in those days (which even tested my sound knowledge of world geography), win Gold in the 100m Men’s Butterfly event. India was approaching the 1 billion mark in population and as an adolescent, you could not help but wonder why we could not get a single medal.
For us in India, the Olympics was actually the world’s best hockey tournament which you had to win. Or at least stop arch-rivals Pakistan from winning it. Once we were out of the hockey tournament, the Olympics from our personal interest point of view was practically over. Other than, of course, some freaks like us, who would continue to celebrate sport, come what may.
The first glimmer of hope was raised by an unassuming tribal boy from Rajasthan when he proceeded to represent India at the 1992 Barcelona Games on the back of a World record-equaling feat in our traditional sport of Archery. The same old Indian sporting story of too much hype and wilting under pressure of expectations followed and Limba Ram – the great Limba Ram – missed an Olympic medal by a point. By now, the decline in hockey had taken worrying roots and India had gone three successive Olympics without a medal.
All that changed, when a confident, smart and young South Kolkata boy won the Men’s Single Bronze medal in Tennis out of nowhere at the 1996 Atlanta Games. The determination, fight, and passion for the flag that he showed in going about achieving this stupendous feat, single-handedly got the Indian Olympic movement back on track.
The mental block was shattered and belief was instilled that we could do it, not because, but despite a floundering sports administrative system and infrastructure. The legend of Leander Paes will be on show again at Rio - for an unbelievable seventh time at the Summer Games and if you ask him, he is still gunning for a medal, 20 years after his feat at Atlanta.
The year 2000 saw the gritty and diminutive Karnam Malleswari win another Bronze in Women’s weightlifting, and then Col. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore broke the Bronze jinx at the 2004 Athens Olympics by winning a Silver in the Men’ Double Trap shooting event. This was when sportspersons across disciplines in India, stopped talking about only competing at the Olympics and started thinking on the lines of winning a medal. It resulted in us coming back with three medals from the subsequent Beijing 2008 Games, which included our first ever Individual Gold medalist in Abhinav Bindra, who won the Gold in the Men’s 10m Air Rifle event. London 2012 gave us six medals, without a Gold, but clearly, the welcome upward graph continued to be maintained.
In 2016, therefore, it is but natural for expectations to run even higher for Indian fans of Olympic sports. And rightly so. There is already talk about bettering the London medals tally and if all goes according to plan, and in the Rio Olympics, we should be easily topping London 2012. At the very least, equal it. Anything less will be a major disappointment.
It will be important to get on the medals tally early if that needs to happen. Peer success, particularly in the case of us Indians is contagious. We start thinking on the lines of ‘if he can do it, I can do it as well.’ The shooters in this regard will have to shoulder a lot of responsibility given their medals get decided the earliest in the Games. In fact, the first medal of the Games will be won by a shooter. Also, among the sports where we look to win medals, shooting is the favourite by far. Even in London last time, Gagan Narang’s early Bronze set us off to our best ever Olympics campaign.
All Indian eyes should, therefore, be on the Olympic Shooting Centre at Deodoro Park in Rio on Saturday, August 6, when two sets of shooting medals will be given out with our chances quite bright in both of them.
Let the Games begin.
