Why Is India so Bad at Sports?

People from all over the world were waiting this past December for the 2014 FIFA World Cup draws to be released, including me. Now, I had already known that India had not qualified for the World Cup, but as the group stages of the draws were being released I wondered how is it possible that India did not make the World Cup. Having first-hand experience to being Indian I knew that the priorities in Indian families were practically just academics and going to medical school. Sports are viewed as almost a waste of time by parents and that you will never make a career out of it so why play it. Even the father of arguably one of the greatest Indian athletes, Leander Paes (tennis), agreed that most parents view sports as a waste of time and that you can’t make a living off of it.

Going back to the World Cup, I thought that a starting lineup of a soccer team has 11 people and the population of India is over 1.2 billion, how can you not find 11 players out of 1.2 billion people who are at the least pretty good. The chances of finding a talented player are so high that when you put the numbers into a calculator you won’t even get a straightforward answer. India has actually never played in a World Cup, but there are plenty of other popular international sporting events that India has participated in, where they showed how god awful they are in sports.

I don’t want you guys to think that India is bad at all sports because there is one sport that I know of where they are actually ranked as one of the top countries, and that sport is cricket. The problem is that the sport that many Indian people care about, no one else does.

The Summer Olympics is one of the most popular and prestigious sporting events in the world, and this is the stage where India has proved how lousy they really are at sports.

In the past three Summer Olympics India has totaled 1 gold medal, 3 silver medals, and 6 bronze medals. In all of the Olympics combined they have only accumulated 26 metals (9 gold, 6 silver, and 11 bronze). To put that in perspective at the 2012 London Olympics U.S.A. alone achieved 46 GOLD medals. I don’t even think I have to explain how embarrassing of a fact that is. Michael Phelps, American swimmer, totaled 8 gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which is just one short of gold medals India has achieved in all the Olympics combined. Great Britain whose population (63.2 million) is just .0526 of India’s totaled 65 medals (29 gold, 17 silver, and 19 bronze), which is 2 and a half times the amount of medals India has ever won.

I’m sure that these statistics proved how tragic India really is at sports. I hope someday people in India will start to care about sports and some type of system will be created to help develop athletes, mainly from a young age. If not, then all of us will be able to see India fail to succeed whatsoever, or rather tune in to another country that’s actually worth watching.