Thank you for the shout out Catherine! Go Sports seems like an amazing idea, capitalizing on the athletic talent that India has to offer. I hope to learn more about them, and since they are headquartered in Bangalore, might just have to drop in and observe. I think that a country like India has the potential to become a sports powerhouse, yet the lack of financial backing is what is really holding back the progression of their athletes. I have never heard of a system where a business employs athletes to train, while using the threat of full time work schedules as motivation to train harder. This is quite unique and seems like a legitimate way to incentivize athletic performance.
The low output of Indian Olympic athletes has been a trend over the years. In the Summer Olympic Games, in Athens in 2004, India sent 73 athletes, in 2008 in Beijing, they sent 59. In comparison, America sent delegations of 619 and 594 respectively. When it comes to Winter Olympics, it gets even more dispersed. In 2006 in Turin, India sent 4 athletes, and recently sent 3 to Vancouver, while America sent 211 and 216.
Many of the powerhouse sports nations spend hundreds of millions of dollars training and preparing their athletes for competition. This can be due to the social and economic history and development of each nation too. India, as Lindsay mentioned, is a very young nation and as India keeps growing economically, they will have the resources to spend on athletics. This is a great goal to aspire to, but won’t come to fruition for a while; it will take time for India to build up its athletic resources. It should be interesting to see how these athletes perform against the best in the world, and hopefully they can win some medals!
No comments:
Post a Comment