In Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India, Ronojoy Sen quotes Horatio Smith, who had this to say in the Calcutta Review a few years before the 1857 rebellion: “The most superficial observer of Bengali manners must know that their games and sports are, for the most part, sedentary… (h)is maxim being that ‘walking is better than running, standing than walking, sitting than standing, and lying down best of all’, his amusements have to be for the most part sedentary."

Colonial calumny indeed. And yet, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi wished the Indian Olympics contingent well in his 22nd Mann Ki Baat address last Sunday—the Rio Olympics will begin this Friday—the odds were high that the final medal tally will confirm the unfair reputation Indians have of being an unathletic people.

In the face of the genetic and cultural diversity to be found in India, this is an absurd proposition. But how to explain the numbers? Since India first participated in the world’s premier sporting event in 1900, it has won a total of 26 medals—less than powerhouses like the US and China win in a single Olympics, on par with far smaller countries such as Thailand and Morocco. What gives?

In Who Wins the Olympic Games: Economic Resources and Medal Totals, published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2004, Andrew B. Bernard and Meghan R. Busse examined the role of population and per capita gross domestic product (GDP).

Population by itself, taken as an indicator of a large talent pool, was a non-starter—naturally, given India and China with the latter performing relatively poorly too until 1996, the cutoff point for the data. A large population allied to high GDP per capita was a different matter. According to them, this was the best predictor of Olympic success.

This makes intuitive sense. More economic muscle means more money spent on infrastructure, personnel and supporting organizations. A wealthy country with high standards of living is also more likely to have sports as a part of schooling. The way in which India was priced out of hockey—its lone bright spot at the Olympics for decades—after the switch from natural turf to synthetic shows the importance of economic resources. There are outliers, but they can be explained either by authoritarian governments with an unrestricted ability to direct resources—eastern bloc nations during the Cold War—or dominance in a single low-cost sport that is a traditional strength.

But according to Anirudh Krishna and Eric Haglund in Why Do Some Countries Win More Olympic Medals? Lessons for Social Mobility and Poverty Reduction, EPW, 2008, that is not the full story. They argue that the crucial factor is the size of what they term the effective participating population—that is, how widely opportunity is distributed amidst the overall population. Using regression analysis, they find that the most important determinant of this is public information about the Olympics, what the event means, athletic opportunities and so on. Better informed—and better connected via road networks—populations translate to larger effective participating populations and better performance at the Olympics.

Plausible as these theories are, it’s unlikely that there is any one cause for India’s failure at the Olympics. Secondary factors like poor administration probably have some role to play. And then there are intangibles like India’s often-cited lack of a sporting culture. The latter is historically untrue—Sen makes that clear enough, reaching as far back as the sporting contests in the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In current circumstances, however, a de-emphasis of sports in culture is understandable. More conventional career choices are better when sporting achievement often doesn’t ensure economic security and there is no social safety net to mitigate the cost of failing.

Unfortunately, these structural factors mean that India’s performance at the Rio Olympics is unlikely to stray significantly from the norm. Researchers at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College who debuted a model in 2000 that has proved successful peg India at seven medals—just one more than the 2012 London Olympics.

But here’s a thought. If Modi truly wants India to achieve sporting glory, perhaps the best thing he can do is start the process of loosening the government’s grip. After all, if there is one thing Indian cricket’s much-maligned overlords have shown, it’s that private bodies can use the market to work through the barriers facing Indians in sporting endeavours. So much for Smith’s sedentary Indian.

Can India spring a surprise at the Olympics this time? Tell us at views@livemint.com

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