This is the year of the next edition of the Summer Olympics which return to London after 1948..
Its another great sporting event that pits the world's best against each other. One wonders how India would fare at this edition of the games. In Beijing we won 1 gold and 2 bronze medals largely due to the individual brilliance of Abhinav Bindra, Sushil Kumar and Vijender Singh. Who will be our saviours this time? As a country we have failed at the Summer Olympic Games. It is indeed surprising that a country of a billion struggles to win a few medals. Given our economic progress it is strange that we are yet to achieve significance as a sporting power. China on the other hand has made rapid strides in the sporting arena along with economic success. Different authors have penned diverse reasons for this suprising failure to win medals. I believe there are three main reasons for our failure - One we dont take sports seriously enough in our culture, two our economic progress is skewed and the benefits are yet to reach a larger section of the society where issues like nutrition and opportunities impact the growth of our sportsmen and women, three lack of international training facilities and modern sports medicine and coaching methods. We have not given sports its due for instance in our yearly Budgets or even in State Budgets. Sports is a great reflection of national pride and it is indeed suprising and sad that we choose to ignore such a wonderful opportunity to annouce our arrival as a nation. It is not only the government's responsibility to promote sports but also private enterprises should build state of the art sporting infrastructure to promote different sports.
Hopefully we would have new champions in this edition of the Olympics..after all the controversy regarding sponsorship of the Games by Dow Chemicals its time to look forward to the greatest sporting event of the year..let the Games being..let the best win..
