Winning medals at Olympics - Data driven approach

Prashant Mudgal

For past few weeks every day one of my office friends asks me in front of everyone the same question - “So, how many medals did India win?” and then smiles. Finally India opened its account with a bronze by Sakshi Mallik and tomorrow PV Sindhu will play in the gold medal match against Spaniard. It is a matter of immense pride for us that athletes are able to give their best despite negligible help from Govt. authorities. India is a country of 1.2 Billion people and winning a couple of medals and taking pride in it doesn’t add to the equation. Yes, it doesn’t but what adds to the equation is that there are winners despite lack of resources.

Olympics is a strange event. It comes once in four years and people cheer for those athletes whose name they would forget in a couple of days and would go back to usual NBA, Football, Baseball and in Indian context to Cricket. People forget the olympics for next 4 years but the participants don’t; olympic gold is a dream for most of the athletes and requires consistent focus, practice, grit, merit, determination, tenacious efforts and indelible desire to win.

A country obsessed with cricket and myopic towards other sports would give myriad reasons why India doesn’t do well at olympics. Google poor performance of India at olympics and you would find pages after pages on it and people are denigrating and castigating either govt. or players for the poor show. Some don’t even consider it a problem; to them just like space programs of India, sports are waste of resources which should be channelized towards removing poverty and creating employment. If you take a look at the medals tally for any past olympic games you would see that the same nations are being reshuffled in the top 20-25 spots with very few changes and most of them are the first world nation as they like to call themselves. Olympics data can act as a reference to HDI (Human Development Index) of a country than merely

referring to the raw talent present in the nation. How do we measure growth of an economy? With help of GDP, so let’s see how top GDP nations are doing at olympics.

India and Brazil are way too off here. We might need another statistic to measure. GDP per capita should be our choice. Most of the above listed countries rank high on GDP per capita except India, Brazil, China and Russia. Despite low GDP per capita China and Russia’s success can be attributed to their Govt. that focuses on either institutionalizing the games or by treating these games as wars in which gold or nothing attitude helps them. The same can be observed for Hungary, Cuba, Ukraine etc - all of them have/had totalitarian regimes and they focused

US China Japan Germany UK FranceIndia Italy Brazil Canada Korea SpainAustralia Russia

on very few sports and mastered them. India’s GDP per capita is low and that translates to fewer resources for common man and concentration of wealth to certain strata of the society. Fewer resources means fewer opportunities and poor infrastructure. Corruption at bureaucratic level also feeds on the system and is sucking the marrow out of it.

In nutshell, there is a problem and the first step to solve any problem is to acknowledge that there is one and then only one can take a minuscule step towards the solution otherwise it is akin to groping in dark for the answers to unknown puzzles.

Let’s look at data of 2012 Olympics held in London.

Out of total 962 medals awarded, 61% were won in 9 sports and rest in others. Athletics and Swimming accounted for 26% of the total.

Judo Swimming Wrestling Boxing CyclingAthletics Badminton Canoeing Weightlifting Others

The same can be seen easily in the bar chart, the athletics and swimming peaks are higher than anything else. USA, usual number 1 spot holder in summer olympics, knows this stat and exploits it. In 2012, USA won 104 medals and 60 came in either Gymnastics or Swimming.

Judo

Swimming

Wrestling

Boxing

Cycling

Athletics

Badminton

Canoeing

Weightlifting

Others

0 100 200 300 400

Gymnastics Swimming Others

Same is the case with Cuba, a small country with a total of 209 medals in Olympic history. 68% of their medals are in boxing, athletics and Judo. This is an example of focused use of resources.

Jamaica and Ethiopia are other great examples of such focused practices. Jamaica has won 69 medals in total and 68 have come in sprinting.

Boxing + Athletics + Judo Others

Rio olympics are in progress and similar observations can be drawn from the medals tally. Out of 770 medals awarded till now, 103 have come in swimming, 96 in athletics and approx. 50 each in shooting and wrestling.

Countries that have focused on promoting the games that they are likely to win get medals in those sports. Look at history of your country and check what sports we are likely to succeed in? In Indian context there are badminton, wrestling, weightlifting, mixed doubles tennis in the list. High rewarding sports such as swimming should be focal point and so should be athletics. They are highly rewarding. USOC puts more funds in

Swimming Athletics Wrestling Shooting Others

swimming than may be at equestrian and all of us know how well this strategy has paid off. England too after dismal performance in Atlanta olympics focused on few sports and we have started seeing it in top 5 and in Rio 2016 is at number 2 next to US.

India doesn’t lack talent but resources. Focus on highly rewarding sports, institutionalizing of games that see through the results, removal of bureaucratic systems that are non functional or bring nepotism are cancerous to growth of the cause. The notion of academics > sports and sports = only cricket should also be tackled that are deep rooted in Indian psyche and then we certainly would find ourselves high on the medals tally.