Shooting star

An Indian has won a gold medal for individual excellence at the Olympics for the first time, and tributes are flowing in: Abhinav Bindra, ignored for some time as someone who would probably never live up to his tremendous potential, is now being hailed by all sorts of people and organisations. This is unsurprising, of course: we should not underestimate the continual quiet humiliation of India’s being absent from the gold-medal tally at one Olympic Games after another. It is also sadly predictable, in that the tendency to associate oneself with winners once they have won rather than grooming them beforehand, is endemic within the sporting and cultural establishment.

Bindra’s is very much an individual achievement in every sense, and the more remarkable for it. He even trained at a shooting range at his parents’ home. If we are lucky, more such triumphs may emerge during these Games, and it would not be very surprising if in each case those triumphs will come in spite of our sporting infrastructure, rather than because of it. Given that, the sports minister’s stated belief that this medal is the harbinger of Indian “sporting dominance” is particularly ludicrous.

That being said, Bindra’s accomplishment does indeed, in a way, allow us a glimpse of a new era. For too long India has been shut out at this greatest of sporting events; for too long dozens of other countries, some with sporting establishments even more dysfunctional than India’s, all of them smaller, have staked out regular spots on the medals table, while Indians have glumly watched their best fail to qualify. That this might be changing is a relief, and something of which we can all be proud. As the congratulatory SMSs flying across the country demonstrate, India is crying out for successes of this sort. Without massive changes to our national priorities, we are unlikely to “dominate” medals tallies any time soon, but Abhinav Bindra’s brilliance has allowed us to believe that the most gifted of our sportsmen will start receiving accolades they deserve on the world’s biggest stage.