Asian Window

A population of over one billion has so far won only one medal at the Beijing Olympics. Why can’t India do better? In a recent paper in the Bombay-published journal Economic and Political Weekly, Anirudh Krishna and Eric Haglund, two academics at Duke University in the United States, say the problem for India is the number of people who can effectively participate in sports”. Nearly 8 million children suffer from malnutrition and more than 250 million live below the poverty line. The authors contend that social mobility is the key to countries’ success at the Olympics. [via The Guardian]

Abhinav Bindra with his Gold medal at Beijing Olympics

Compared to its share in the world’s population, India’s share of Olympic medals is abysmally low. In the 2004 Olympic Games, for example, India won only one medal. Turkey, which has less than one-tenth of India’s population, won 10 times as many medals, and Thailand, which has roughly 6 per cent of India’s population, won eight times as many medals.

India’s one-sixth share in the world’s population translated into a 1/929 share in 2004 Olympic medals. While Australia won 2.46 medals per one-million population and Cuba won 2.39 medals per one-million population, India brought up the bottom of this international chart, winning a mere 0.0009 medals per one-million population. Nigeria, next lowest, had 18 times this number, winning 0.015 medals per one-million population.1 Why does the average Indian count for so little? What prevents the translation of India’s huge number of people into a proportionate – or even near-proportionate – number of Olympic medals? The gross domestic product certainly matters, as previous analyses have indicated [Bernard and Busse 2004], but something else also seems to be making a difference, given that Cuba, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kenya and Uzbekistan – countries not known for having high average incomes – have won many more medals than India, despite having a far smaller national population. Why do 10 million Indians win less than one-hundredth of one Olympic medal, while 10 million Uzbeks won 4.7 Olympic medals?

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