It is not often that a person gets an opportunity to correct the wrongs he and his fraternity have suffered at the hands of the establishment, especially if one happens to be a sportsperson. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, the distinguished sportsperson and Olympic silver medallist, is the sports minister.
It places him in a position where he can, given his experience and knowledge of what ails sports in India, restructure a creaky system and put sportspersons and not officials at the forefront of planning and policies. In India, sports begins and ends with cricket with all other variants of competitive physical activities channelled through various disciplines never getting the attention, resources and publicity they need or deserve.
In a country as diverse and huge as India and lacking in budgetary support from the government, sports is bound to suffer unless it gets the corporate world to support it. Since cricket is its most popular sporting enterprise, all other disciplines are at the mercy of government investment. It becomes worse when not just lack of money but insensitive, callous, self-promoting individuals run the federations that frame the dos and don’ts for those who strive for excellence.
These are well-documented facts and need no elaboration. There are too many problems that have stymied India’s growth as a sporting nation. After each four-year cycle of the Olympic Games, we end up embarrassing ourselves, our meagre medal haul being hugely disproportionate to population and pretensions of being a global power.
When a Rathore comes along, winning a rare medal for the country in the Olympics, we celebrate as if there is no tomorrow. The stories of triumph against odds get glorified, exposing a system that instead of being a help has become a problem. Rathore’s story has been no different. He may have been luckier for having been an army officer and getting a lot of support from them while training to compete among the best in the world. But he too, like most, has been a victim of official neglect and apathy and has never been shy of airing his views even when he won the silver medal in Athens in 2004.
The Rathore we know has been a very competitive, driven, single-minded person, who achieved a rare Olympic medal in an extremely competitive sport like shooting. And even when success was not eluding him, he had stories to tell. Stories of nepotism, financial crunch and manipulation, both in the ministry and the federation, that was a hurdle in his way of achieving more than he finally did.
Today, he is on the other side of the fence. The sporting fraternity rejoiced when he was appointed sports minister. What better man than him to head the ministry whose primary job is to strive and improve the country’s sporting culture. Rathore knows first hand what sportspersons actually need and what they eventually get. There is a huge gap between the two and unless that is corrected, no matter what we do, we are never going to be a sporting power.
Rathore is a pragmatic man and even he would realise that to set ambitious goals may be a way forward, but to expect to leapfrog the systemic and sociological loopholes in a hurry will be foolhardy. However, a beginning has to be made, and the first thing that he can do is to have a meaningful connect with all stakeholders and inject transparency and accountability into the sporting structure of the country.