Olympics date back to 776
BC or earlier.
The history and its journey invoke
respect to the event. Winning a medal and be a part of it is a historic experience
for every sportsperson.
Developing countries find it
challenging to win medals at Olympics and developed countries manage it easily.
It was believed that
developed countries have superior infrastructure and assistance of Technology
for improving the performance of a sportsperson.
As an Indian, I believed in
early 1980’s till 2000, that an Indian will never be able to win a Gold medal. Fault
list included lack of infrastructure, technology, support from sports bodies,
over interest in Cricket, inability of the Indian sportsperson etc.
Today, I decided let me do
some analysis to see which country has won the majority of medals since 1896 to
2014 (source reference given separately) which included both summer and winter Olympics.
Total medals tally, all
inclusive, stands at 17,579 medals. Country wise the top 10 winners i.e. total
medals won and how much they form as a percentage of 17,579 medals are listed
below:
Team
(IOC code)
|
Total
medals
|
%
|
United States (USA)
|
2,681
|
15%
|
Soviet Union (URS)
|
1,204
|
7%
|
Great Britain (GBR)
|
806
|
5%
|
Germany (GER)
|
782
|
4%
|
France (FRA)
|
780
|
4%
|
Italy (ITA)
|
663
|
4%
|
Sweden (SWE)
|
627
|
4%
|
China (CHN)
|
526
|
3%
|
East Germany (GDR)
|
519
|
3%
|
Russia (RUS)
|
518
|
3%
|
Surprisingly,
all of the countries are / were power houses and developed countries. The above
ten formed 52% of the tally and the rest i.e. 48% was distributed amongst 136
countries. I do not have to mention that many of those are poor / under
developed / developing countries. Some have never won like Bangladesh, Nepal
etc.
In my quest to understand
what makes these countries special I searched for articles in the web and I stumbled
upon one.
The article 'Durgstore Athlete' was written by
Malcolm Gladwell (September 10, 2001).
I wish to reproduce select
sections of the article here as is and leave it for the reader for
interpretation.
The article is very comprehensive
and well written; heart of the subject is assistance of medicine in improving performance of athletes.
On Competing:
“Later, Francis says, he was confronted at a track meet by Brian
Oldfield, then one of the world’s best shot-putters:
“When are you going to start
getting serious?” he demanded. “When are you going to tell your guys the facts
of life?” I asked him how he could tell they weren’t already using steroids. He
replied that the muscle density just wasn’t there. “Your guys will never be
able to compete against the Americans–their careers will be over,” he
persisted.”
On drastic improvement in performance:
“It is hard to believe, for instance, that the sprinter Florence
Griffith Joyner, the star of the Seoul games, was clean. Before 1988, her best
times in the hundred metres and the two hundred metres were, respectively,
10.96 and 21.96. In 1988, a suddenly huskier FloJo ran 10.49 and 21.34, times
that no runner since has even come close to equalling. In other words, at the
age of twenty-eight–when most athletes are beginning their decline–Griffith
Joyner transformed herself in one season from a career-long better-than-average
sprinter to the fastest female sprinter in history. Of course, FloJo never
failed a drug test. But what does that prove? FloJo went on to make a fortune
as a corporate spokeswoman.”
On testing mechanisms:
“The basic problem with drug testing is that testers are always
one step behind athletes. It can take years for sports authorities to figure
out what drugs athletes are using, and even longer to devise effective means of
detecting them. Anabolic steroids weren’t banned by the International Olympic
Committee until 1975, almost a decade after the East Germans started using
them. “
On Fairness of Sports:
“That is a less than perfect outcome, of course, but international
sports is not a perfect world. It is a place where Ben Johnson is disgraced and
FloJo runs free, where Butch Reynolds is barred for two years and East German
coaches pee into cups–and where athletes without access to the cutting edge of
medicine are condemned to second place. Since drug testers cannot protect the
purity of sport, the very least they can do is to make sure that no athlete can
cheat more than any other.”
The best section of the
article is the example of Roger Bannister and an eye opener for me; it is
little long but worth reading:
“The first man to break the four-minute mile was the Englishman
Roger Bannister, on a windswept cinder track at Oxford, nearly fifty years ago.
Bannister is in his early seventies now, and one day last summer he returned to
the site of his historic race along with the current world-record holder in the
mile, Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj. The two men chatted and compared notes and
posed for photographs. “I feel as if I am looking at my mirror image,”
Bannister said, indicating El Guerrouj’s similarly tall, high-waisted frame. It
was a polite gesture, an attempt to suggest that he and El Guerrouj were part
of the same athletic lineage. But, as both men surely knew, nothing could be
further from the truth.
Bannister was a medical
student when he broke the four-minute mile in 1954. He did not have time to
train every day, and when he did he squeezed in his running on his hour-long
midday break at the hospital. He had no coach or trainer or entourage, only a
group of running partners who called themselves “the Paddington lunch time
club.” In a typical workout, they might run ten consecutive quarter miles–ten
laps–with perhaps two minutes of recovery between each repetition, then gobble
down lunch and hurry back to work. Today, that training session would be
considered barely adequate for a high-school miler. A month or so before his
historic mile, Bannister took a few days off to go hiking in Scotland. Five
days before he broke the four-minute barrier, he stopped running entirely, in
order to rest. The day before the race, he slipped and fell on his hip while
working in the hospital. Then he ran the most famous race in the history of
track and field. Bannister was what runners admiringly call an “animal,” a
natural.
El Guerrouj, by contrast,
trains five hours a day, in two two-and-a-half-hour sessions. He probably has a
team of half a dozen people working with him: at the very least, a masseur, a
doctor, a coach, an agent, and a nutritionist. He is not in medical school. He
does not go hiking in rocky terrain before major track meets. When Bannister
told him, last summer, how he had prepared for his four-minute mile, El
Guerrouj was stunned. “For me, a rest day is perhaps when I train in the
morning and spend the afternoon at the cinema,” he said. El Guerrouj certainly
has more than his share of natural ability, but his achievements are a
reflection of much more than that: of the fact that he is better coached and
better prepared than his opponents, that he trains harder and more
intelligently, that he has found a way to stay injury free, and that he can
recover so quickly from one day of five-hour workouts that he can follow it,
the next day, with another five-hour workout.”
After reading the article
written by Malcolm Gladwell, I do not regret now that India has not won many
medals in Olympics. If the assistance, Mr. Gladwell has dwelled in the article
was not there to Indian Athletes, let us stop blaming Indian Sportsmen, its
infrastructure and support systems.
India now is on the path of
becoming a developed country in few years.
I hope we do not win medals
like others by imitating their infrastructure support.
Source:
