"STAIRS directly supports schemes like TOPS on a large scale" - Siddhartha Upadhyay on his mission to help India's pursuit of Olympic excellence

Siddhartha Upadhyay aims to help India do better at the Olympic level and to ensure that, he has been working hard to bring change at the grassroots level.

For Siddhartha, working with budding youngsters is not new. He was a Member – Governing Council (2017-2020) with the Ministry of Youth Affairs & Sports. He was also a part of the Steering Committee for the FIFA U-17 World Cup, BRICS U-17 Tournament, and many more.

Through the STAIRS Foundation, he hopes to make an impact at the base level in the country and increase the quality (and quantity) of Indian athletes at the highest level.

Ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, where all eyes will be on the likes of Neeraj Chopra and Co., Siddhartha, in an exclusive conversation with Sportskeeda, spoke about the foundation's work, the impact so far, and more.

Question: Why is there a need to work at the grassroots level in sports?

Siddhartha: Can you make a building without bricks, cement, bars, sand, etc? No. Then how can you make Olympic podium finishers without raw talent that has been identified and nurtured to reach a position where a certain section of society, people, and stakeholders can invest in them?

Q: What work does the STAIRS Foundation do?

Siddhartha: STAIRS directly supports TOPS (Target Olympic Podium Scheme) and many other schemes in the country, not with the same name but with the same intent. We identify kids or talent-filled areas across the country, do the outreach, and create opportunities for talent scouting, training, and development. We also support the local infrastructure, develop the ecosystem, and ensure the kids from top to bottom utilize our patented STAIRS program.

In the end, we help give the kids the kind of atmosphere that helps them give their best performance and then improve upon it.

Finally, out of lakhs and lakhs of kids who participate at the grassroots level, they will reach a position where they identify their talent to help reach the national level. Once they reach the national level, they would have played multiple competitions that would give them a certain kind of exposure and confidence which would make them fit for schemes for TOPS.

Q: So does STAIRS is similar to TOPS?

Siddhartha: I would say STAIRS directly supports schemes like TOPS on a large scale. At the same time, what STAIRS does and what TOPS does should and must not be compared because one is a sports excellence scheme and the other is a grassroots sports development process.

Q: What does STAIRS aim to achieve?

Siddhartha: Typically if you talk about data analytics and statistics, if 100 kids participate, two or three or four or five kids do well. And they are bankable for becoming podium finishers at the Olympics.

What STAIRS does is take this number from 100 to lakhs, so that these two, three, and four kids that you are talking about become 10,000 kids and so on. And from those, you subsequently build better Olympic finishers and you can put in all sorts of analytics and experts who'd examine different aspects of performing well at the international level.

Q: What impact has STAIRS had so far?

Siddhartha: I particularly would say that we reach out to every nook and corner of the country. STAIRS, after almost five years of hiatus, we resumed in April last year and now we are already in 462 districts in the country. We have conducted over 2000 events at the grassroots level, and almost two lakh kids have played, with almost 10,000 schools affected directly or indirectly by our programs.

Almost 5000 gold medalists came out of matches conducted between those districts to the state and now to the national level. This is the whole idea of STAIRS. And this is just the start.