Hosting Olympics can be crippling

Rohit Mahajan
Associate editor

INDIA wishes to hold the Olympic Games, says Anurag Thakur, the Union Sports Minister. “If India is making news in every sector, from manufacturing to services, then why not in the field of sports? India is looking very seriously at bidding for the 2036 Olympics,” Thakur said recently.

The cost of hosting the Olympic Games has been spiralling out of control, with the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics costing around $13 billion, or $1,300 crore. By the time 2036 comes, the cost could be higher — is India willing to pay this kind of mad money to host the Olympic Games?

Organising a sporting event such as the Olympics is the announcement of arrival — of a country at the dais of the world, signifying that a nation and its economy have made it.

Even stripped bare of political and nationalistic objectives behind holding multi-sports events, sport under all kinds of economic systems benefits from the welfare state model. Under all kinds of governments — from the colonial and neo-colonial capitalist western superpowers to the developing and underdeveloped economies, from dictatorships to theocracies to kingdoms — sport is underpinned by the welfare system. The state pays for identifying, nurturing and training top athletes.

This makes perfect sense from a practical point of view, because a sporting people are likely to be fitter and healthier, and a lighter burden on the medical infrastructure of a country.

But it’s the notional benefits that are prized more and it is these that drive a government’s spending in sport. Sport has little inherent use — of what material use can be a perfect backhand by Federer or Messi shrugging off a defender? — but it can achieve what even scientists and philosophers can’t. Success in sport shows that a country’s people are strong and robust, it builds up the ego of a nation. In modern times, in the absence of war, and undesirability of it, sport is used to demonstrate the strength of a nation’s people.

The Indian government funds sports through various bodies and under various schemes. High on the Sports Ministry’s priorities is Khelo India, which had an allocation of Rs 974 crore for the financial year 2022-23.

In the current fiscal year, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) was allotted Rs 653 crore, while the total allocation for various National Sports Federations was Rs 280 crore. SAI runs several training schemes and, according to its own statistics, currently it has 9,225 trainees, 6,586 of them in residential facilities. It maintains several stadiums, including the flagship Jawaharlal Nehru Sports Stadium in Delhi.

Apart from this, India spends a tidy sum to train its elite athletes. The Target Olympics Podium Scheme (TOPS), launched in 2014, currently benefits around 300 athletes, including around 100 in the core group.

Medals don’t come without money — India won seven medals at last year’s Tokyo Olympics, including a historic gold by Neeraj Chopra in athletics. PV Sindhu won a second successive Olympics medal, and the men’s hockey team ended a 41-year Olympic medal drought while the women’s team came close to winning a medal. Then, at the Tokyo Paralympics, India won 19 medals — a number higher than the total of medals won in all the previous Paralympics!

Medals at global events are a precious commodity, costing an athlete blood and tears, and a nation crores of rupees. It’s no surprise that the world’s richest countries lead the list of the medal-winners at events such as the Olympics. In fact, India’s spending on its athletes dwarfs when compared to what Great Britain spent on its medallists in the 2012 London Olympics. Each medal the hosts won in their home Olympics cost a little over £4.5 million, or over Rs 39 crore, in 2012 money. Ten years on, it would be much higher in today’s money. From around 2008, Great Britain invested £100 million a year to train 1,200 athletes across 47 sports in the Olympics and Paralympics. This is what pushed Great Britain’s gold count to 29 in London, up from one in 1996.

The cost of organising an event such as the Olympic Games can cripple an economy and prove disastrous for a people — ask Greece, hosts of the 2004 Olympics — but it’s an ego-driven exercise in which a nation is aiming for notional rather than mere material gains. Governments across the world, run by people belonging to all political and economic ideologies, do it — from communists to capitalists to fascists to dictators.

It’s not just New India that harbours such a wish — building a nation and the national self-image, and global prestige, is an old international project.

The left-of-centre Nehru did it in India in 1951, hosting the first Asian Games merely four years after Independence, in order to demonstrate the new nation’s recovery from the crippling and disastrous events of the previous decade, including famine and the Partition bloodbath. Japan held the 1964 Olympic Games to demonstrate that merely 19 years after devastation and humiliating surrender in World War II, it had turned the corner — it was now a prosperous nation, an industrial powerhouse that would, within four years from then, leap to the third place in the list of the world’s largest economies. Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Olympics were aimed at showing to the world that the country had recovered from the economic hardships of the 1920s and the humiliation of loss in World War I, that it was back in a position of power on the global stage; he also wanted to showcase the supposed superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race.

The 2008 Olympic Games, held in Beijing, were called ‘Beijingoism’ because they were an emphatic and undeniable demonstration of China’s economic and sporting progress. Two years later, China showcased Guangzhou in another impressive display of its economic and organisational — and sporting — might at the Asian Games.

The 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi — called ‘Indira Gandhi Games’ by the then Sports Minister Buta Singh — was a significant event for the then Prime Minister, who had returned to power two years previously: the event was deemed a success and fears of attacks and disruption by militants from Punjab proved unfounded. Money was poured into the event, sporting infrastructure came up, new flyovers constructed and Indira Gandhi tried to put the disgrace of Emergency behind her. The event also served as a launching pad into organisational activities for Rajiv Gandhi, the former pilot and future Prime Minister. The 2010 Commonwealth Games were criticised for an overshooting budget, corruption and sorry and squalid infrastructure in the run-up to the event, but right after the grand opening ceremony, and as the medal tally began to rise, pride took over. The Opposition parties roasted the government for corruption and waste of public money — as they had done in 1982 after India hosted the Asian Games.

The cost of hosting the Olympic Games has been spiralling out of control, with the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics costing around $13 billion or $1,300 crore. By the time 2036 comes, the cost could be higher — is India willing to pay this kind of mad money to host the Olympic Games? The Olympics now are not primarily about sport, contrary to what the average fan thinks — it’s a platform for projecting a country’s soft power, and to influence opinions and achieve geopolitical goals internationally, and political and economic goals internally. Politicians of all stripes and all ideologies need to achieve these goals. This is why public spending on sport will endure, and this is why India could well go for the super-costly toy in 2036.