India’S Accomplishments At The 2008 Summer Olympics At Beijing

The 2008 Summer Olympics at Beijing will always have a very special place in Indian sporting history. It was at these Games that a 25-year-old shooter called Abhinav Bindra, already one of the best in the world in his category (in the qualifying rounds at Athens in 2004, he had broken the Olympic record but still lost out on a medal; and he had won India’s first-ever shooting gold at the World Championships in 2006) finally fulfilled his Olympic destiny, winning for his country its very first gold in an individual event, ever. But there was more to celebrate – wrestler Sushil Kumar won a bronze in his category, and so did boxer Vijender Singh, bringing up the country’s medal tally to three, a never-before event. Among the other eye-catchers was badminton star Saina Nehwal, only 18, who became the first Indian woman to reach the quarter-finals of her event in the Olympics.

This outcome was unexpected, and gratefully embraced by a nation that had suffered heartache and humiliation in the lead-up to Beijing – the men’s hockey team, which had won no less than eight golds, two silvers and one bronze in its glittering history at the Olympics since 1928, had failed to qualify, and the women weightlifters, dogged by doping allegations for the last several years, had been banned from the Games, muddying the legacy of Karnam Malleswari. But there was no time to dwell on either the highs or the lows of 2008, for India was readying for its most ambitious international sports challenge to date – the hosting of the Commonwealth Games 2010. With infrastructure projects already hugely delayed and political discourse descending into the familiar morass of allegations and counter-allegations of corruption, misuse of power, budget overruns, and unfulfilled promises, the dark cloud of self-doubt and despondency about our lack of integrity as a nation, never too far away, was back to haunt us, hovering over dinner-table conversations, fed by the media narrative. As the Games drew closer and it seemed as if we were destined to fail spectacularly, reversing all the hard-won gains to our reputation over the two decades since liberalisation, top athletes began to pull out of the Games, citing reasons as varied as possible terrorist attacks, monsoon floods, and lack of hygiene at the Games Village. But in the akharas and archery academies and running tracks and badminton and table-tennis courts and shooting ranges and hockey stadiums across India, many of them now supported by generous inflows of corporate and government money, the mood was upbeat. In these hallowed places, acutely conscious that the home advantage that was theirs in these Games would not return for several years, the first wave of the daughters of liberalisation were hitting their stride, getting ready to take their game out of Asia and onto the world stage, and win.

And did they win! For the first time in the history of the Commonwealth Games, and supported by thousands of fans who thronged the stadiums to support their boys and girls, India ended an unprecedented second on the medals table, yards behind behemoth Australia but ahead of England and Canada, winning over one hundred medals. And while the men won many more medals, overall, than the women, it was the latter who were breaching long-standing barriers – Krishna Poonia became the first Indian woman to win a Commonwealth gold in athletics when she hurled the discus farther than anyone else in the field, Geeta Phogat became the first Indian woman wrestler to win a gold, and Kavita Raut the first woman to win an individual track medal when she won bronze in the 10000m. The roster of the other medal winners in the women’s events was long and impressive, but the real breakthrough was in the number of different disciplines that women were now winning at. As each day passed and more Indian medals were rung up on the leaderboard, the country’s sporting intelligence and engagement soared. More and more Indians began to tune in to the Games, acquainting themselves with the rules of competition in events that they had had no previous familiarity with – recurve archery, for one.

These were the Games when recurve archers Deepika Kumari (2 golds), Dola Banerjee (1 gold and 1 bronze), and Bombayla Devi (1 gold), and shooters Anisa Sayyed (2 golds), Rahi Sarnobat (1 gold and 1 silver) and Heena Sidhu (1 gold and 1 silver) became household names, as did Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa (gold, women’s doubles, badminton). Sania Mirza (silver) and Saina Nehwal (gold) continued to dominate their sports. The momentum of the Commonwealth Games in October carried over to the Asian Games the very next month – India put on a fine showing, winning a total of 65 medals, including 14 golds. Among the women who won gold medals were a few new names – Preeja Sreedharan (10000m), Sudha Singh (3000m steeplechase), and Ashwini Akkunji (400m hurdles). It was also during the 2010 Asian Games that we first heard the name of a sport called Wushu, aka Chinese Kungfu, a full-contact martial art. Notwithstanding our ignorance, some of our girls were apparently already pretty good at it – for Sandhyarani Devi Wangkhem of Manipur won herself India’s first Wushu silver! It was things like this – a silver medal for an Indian woman at an unknown sport in an international competition – that really signalled that things were getting better and better for Indian sport in general, and Indian sportswomen in general. Plus, there were the sports whose larger stages lay outside the ambit of the Olympics and the Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games – sports like tennis, badminton, boxing, cricket, chess. And our girls were doing marvellously there as well. By 2010, gutsy Sania Mirza had shrugged off a fatwa issued against her for the length of her skirts and a legal case against her ostensible disrespect for the national flag and soared through to the World Top 30 in singles tennis rankings. At the Australian Open in 2006, she became the first Indian woman to be seeded in a Grand Slam event. By 2010, Saina Nehwal, she of the multi-coloured hair clips, had become the first Indian, male or female, to win a BWF Super Series title, one of the Holy Grails in badminton, and was ruling the roost as World No 2. By 2010, Magnificent Mary Kom, the gritty little boxer from Manipur, had already won the World Amateur Boxing Championships no less than five times! No other Indian, man or woman, had come close to achieving anything like it. By 2010, Mithali Raj, the highest run-scorer in women’s international cricket and one of the greatest women to wield a cricket bat, had led India to a thrilling World Cup final. By 2010, Koneru Humpy, still only 23, had been a grandmaster for 8 years. In 2007, she became only the second woman, after Judith Polgar, to exceed the 2600 Elo rating. By 2010, Tania Sachdev had been grandmaster for five years, and won the Asian Chess Championship.

For the first time since I had become a fan, it was becoming extraordinarily difficult to keep up with all the good stuff that was going on. If ever there was a time when young India was spoilt for choice when it came to picking and choosing its female sporting role models, this was it. That was why, like hundreds of other families from across the country, my husband and I had travelled to Delhi during the Commonwealth Games, with our 13-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son in tow. We wanted them to see, first-hand, the world-beating grit of their compatriots on display, hear the gladiatorial roar of the crowd as one of ours crossed the finish line ahead of the others, experience the heart-swelling emotion that comes with hearing the national anthem play as a champion wearing Indian colours mounted the top step of the podium. Like tens of thousands of other children – and adults! – they came away inspired, their attitude towards their country tweaked in small, difficult to articulate, but utterly irrevocable ways.