Odisha shows the way to support sport
It’s the business end of the Olympics and the business of predicting the performances of our athletes has been laid bare. Shooters were expected to kick-start a rush of medals for India, but that never happened. With it, all double-digit tallies went out of the window. There was another sport where predictions were wide off the mark, but in a pleasant way. While the men’s hockey team was expected to reach the quarterfinal and maybe battle for one of the minor medals, the women’s team wasn’t even expected to get out of the pool stages.
Clubbed in a pool with the likes of Great Britain and Netherlands, dignified defeats were expected. Yet, the women have likely kick-started a revolution with their performances. It’s not just the results that will inspire the next generation to take up a hockey stick, it’s the backstories these players have. For example, Lalremsiami is from Mizoram, not a traditional hotbed for hockey. She could now be a totem for young boys and girls from Mizoram who insist on dreaming a different dream. It’s the same with the men’s team. We were told that hockey was a finished sport, that people don’t want it, that the romance was lost forever. Yet, people woke up before 7 am to follow them. The men’s first medal in 41 years will show young kids that the sport, if given the right environment to thrive, can produce results.
The right environment is a mix of support staff, picking the right players rather than going by reputation and trusting the process. After several missteps, Hockey India has avoided sacking both the men’s and women’s senior coaches for no reason. That has allowed a degree of trust to develop between the coaches and players. There has been ample assistance from the Sports Authority of India and one state that really helped the sport organise bigticket events is Odisha. When other states were reluctant to host events, Odisha stepped forward. It has even been sponsoring the teams from before the World Cup in 2018. The next step in this process is equally important. The only thing that creates a winning culture is more medals. The World Cup, Commonwealth Games and Asian Games are in the next 16 months. Otherwise, the success at the Olympics could be forgotten or may be written off as an accident.