MUMBAI: While India are officially in the running to bid for the Olympics in 2036, a development that has ignited excitement among Indians, a look at the country’s performances in recent editions, however, begs an uncomfortable question. In its priority list, would a nation that’s yet to achieve a double-digit Olympic medal tally be better off putting investment of its resources into talent development and improving its Olympic performances above a bid to host the world’s biggest multi-sporting extravaganza?
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe is of the belief that hosting the Olympics could, in fact, be the ideal “vehicle” to reach those goals. “Forget whether it’s India or any other country, any nation that has the ambition to stage Games should be welcomed. I’m a great believer that the biggest driver of interest, excitement and ultimately participation is the well-stocked shop window. There is no better vehicle for that than an Olympic Games,” Coe said during a chat with TOI here on Wednesday.
He added, though: “No organization should ever encourage a city or a country into doing something that’s beyond its capabilities. Those are judgments that have to be made internally. They’ve got to want to be able to do it. They’ve got to want to do it because it meets a number of their objectives. One of those objectives may well be to kick-start and help turbocharge an interest in Olympic sport.”
A double 1500m Olympic gold medallist, Coe, who is one of seven candidates attempting to succeed Thomas Bach as the next International Olympic Committee (IOC) president, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and sports minister Mansukh Mandaviya in New Delhi on Monday, where India’s bid for the 2036 Summer Games was discussed. Few know better than the 68-year-old Briton about just what it takes to deliver a successful bid, as Coe played the lead role in bringing the Games to the city of his birth in 2012. “What I have witnessed, and London was a very good example of that, once a country commits to that and they get the right to stage the Games, then other things fall into place,” Coe said on the sidelines of an event hosted by Tata Communications and World Athletics to discuss their recent global broadcasting services partnership.
“There’s a political willingness to then obviously recognize you have this huge global opportunity and London was a good example. London almost quadrupled the amount of partnership funding that went into the delivery of our elite athletes. And that created a legacy that went way beyond London. We ended up with more medals in Rio (67) than we had in London (65). We had a very, very good showing in Tokyo given the challenges of Covid and then Paris again was a really good example, Olympic and Paralympic. London, for three years after the Games, was the number one tourist destination in the world.”
Coe highlighted the scale of infrastructural change London witnessed over the seven-years it had to get ready to host the Games. “That would never have happened if it had been left to macro-economic cycles, changes of government, changes of political positions,” he said, adding with a wry smile: “You can’t muck around when you have an opening ceremony that’s fixed. It’s not like saying, ‘give us another six months’. It doesn’t work like that.
“So I’m not speaking on behalf of any country here. All I’m saying is that if you get it right, then the multiplier effect in lots of other areas is quite profound and quantifiable.”
A massive cricket fan, Coe couldn’t resist a dig at England’s old rivals Australia, saying he derived “great pleasure” from watching “Australia suffer” at the hands of India in the first Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy at Perth. And as far as sporting rivalries go, the veteran sports administrator also expressed his delight at a blossoming Indo-Pak rivalry, not on the cricket field, but in track and field between javelin sensations Neeraj Chopra and Arshad Nadeem.
“It has to be good, right? That night in the stadium in Paris was absolutely electric. You had the best part of 80,000 people absolutely transfixed by that competition. And if you’d said to athletics enthusiasts 10 years ago,” Coe chuckled, “That you’d have had somebody from India and somebody from Pakistan battling it out for the number one spot in an Olympic Games in javelin, you’d have taken good odds on that.”
Coe added: “Our sport comes to life in head-to-head competitions and there really wasn’t a much bigger head-to-head than that in Paris. And I know the impact that has had for my athletics colleagues in Pakistan because I was at the Asian Athletics Council just the other day. I know the impact that that has clearly had in India.
“Of course, the Indian athletics public were becoming a little used to the Chopra effect. So everybody’s a winner here because this elevates the level of Indian athletics, it elevates the level of South Asian athletics. But critically, they’re both engaging people who are great ambassadors for our sport as well.”
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