India, with one billion people and 117 athletes in Paris, placed 71st in the Olympics medal tally – 16 places below Saint Lucia, with just 180,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile China, which also has a billion plus people, had the joint highest number of golds: 20, tying with the United States. So what will it take to improve India’s record?
For every thrilling success like Neeraj Chopra in javelin—who added a silver to his 2021 gold, and bettered his Tokyo distance by 1.87 m to 89.45 m in Paris—lack of opportunities prevent millions of other young people from reaching their potential.
Lights illuminate the Olympic rings during a performance at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics. (PTI)
India, in fact, invests a third as much in sport as the United Kingdom does, for a country 20 times as big. In 2024, government allocated ₹3,400 crore budget for the ministry of sports and youth affairs. Only a third of that goes to grassroots sports development through Khelo India. Not to mention, 87% of all sports revenue in India goes to cricket, with only 13% left over for all other sports combined.
Both Chopra and Avinash Sable, who I cheered for in the Olympic stadium during his 3,000m steeplechase final, began in farming backgrounds in small villages, and benefited from the sport opportunities on offer from the Indian Army. (It is a similar story for Tajinderpal Singh Toor, also from a farming background, who trained his way through the Indian Navy to Olympic shot put in Tokyo and Paris.) But an Army of one million can only do so much. And it wasn’t until this year that the Army Sports Institute in Pune finally swung open its doors to women.
If India’s medal haul is going to improve, it will be through more corporate funding for sports. Companies like Reliance Industries—whose chairman Mukesh Ambani’s wife Nita was re-elected to the International Olympics Committee—to other mega companies, like the Adani Group, Tata, and steelmaking JSW, are showing themselves keen to bankroll academies and athletes, and associate themselves with high performance sport amid India’s bid for the 2036 Games.
Sport has historically received a tiny share of Indian companies’ corporate social responsibility funding–slightly above 1%. But it has outsized effects in areas like health, and opportunities for women.
More corporate involvement could shake up a highly bureaucratic Indian sporting establishment, and even lead to more support for women in high-performance sport. Women, though, have begun to make some inroads into corporate leadership, making up about a quarter of new executive hires in recent years. Business, just like sport, can be a force for good in society, if we let it.
But a successful bid, and Olympics, in 2036 could be a game-changer for India. Host nations win more medals–three times as many as their average over the three preceding Olympics—partly because they qualify automatically in every sport. France just finished in the top five, for the first time since 1948. In the case of the UK and Brazil, both countries then managed to build on that medal bounce: Through facilities, coaching, and public attention that outlasted the closing ceremony. Brazil even won more medals in 2021 in Tokyo than it did in 2016, in Rio.
In fact, with a bit of needed help from India Inc, just 12 years from now, 2036 could do for all of India’s Olympic sports what winning the 1983 World Cup did for cricket. And what a golden sight that would be.
This article is authored by Pádraig Belton, journalist and marathoner who coaches disadvantaged Dublin youth in athletics.