India should target finishing in the top 25 countries in the 2028 Olympic games (to be held in Los Angeles), Minister for Sports Anurag Thakur has said. This, in the aftermath of India winning seven medals, its highest tally, at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and finishing 48th overall.
“As far as the 2028 Olympics is concerned, India should look to be among the top 25 countries and for the next few years, we should target being among the top 10 sporting countries in the world,” Thakur told Times Now’s Editor-in-Chief Rahul Shivshankar in an exclusive interview at Times Now’s Freedom Summit on Independence Day. “We need to bring all stakeholders on board and ask them to contribute. It’s very important to allow athletes to play more and more events at the grassroots level. In this Olympics, the players who have participated, come from humble backgrounds, from villages, and some even from families who don’t earn two square meals a day. But they have been given the best facilities to train abroad, and in India as well.”
Neeraj Chopra became India’s first Olympian to win a Gold in athletics (Javelin Throw), PV Sindhu, who secured a Bronze, became only the second Indian to win two individual Olympic medals, and the Indian Men’s Hockey team also won a Bronze, the first medal for India in hockey since the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Ravi Dahiya and Bajrang Punia secured a Silver and Bronze respectively in Wrestling, and Mirabai Chanu won the country a Silver in Weightlifting.
A critical factor in India’s relative success this Olympics has been the role played by coaches, a lot of them from overseas. Sindhu was coached by Park Tae-Sang from South Korea, Chopra by two Germans Uwe Hohn and Klaus Bartonietz, both the men’s and women’s hockey teams were coached by foreigners, and so were India’s other medal winners in different capacities. “If we need to hire more foreign coaches, we will do so as well and also create a programme to ‘train the trainers’, Thakur said. “So, our trainers, be it those at PSUs, or in the private sector, or colleges and universities – we need to train them from top to bottom and there should be one kind of training which should take place for one sport.”
Thakur called for greater corporate involvement in sport and the establishment of sporting infrastructure in India, more IPL-style competitive leagues, and creating a pool of coaches to impart training at all levels. He added, “We should not shy away initially from hiring foreign coaches, and the knowledge they have gained through their scientific approach…till the time we don’t have our own scientific research system in place…we will soon have that in place with the best facilities so that we are at par with the rest of the world.
