Dhyan Chand, who led the Indian men’s field-hockey team to victory over Germany in 1936, is widely regarded as the best player the game has ever seen. Photograph by ullstein bild / Getty

Not long ago, I discovered that I could own a piece of my childhood trauma if I shelled out sixteen dollars on eBay. The August 22-28, 1976, issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India, which came out just after the Montreal Olympics, bore the following headline: “600 Million Indians—Not One Bronze!” The men’s field-hockey team, which had won the World Cup the previous year, finished seventh in Montreal. It was the first time since 1924 that the team had returned from the Olympics without a medal. I was thirteen then and do not remember whether the report in the Illustrated Weekly offered me any consolation. It probably didn’t, since the headline is the only thing that has remained in my memory. Which is all to say that, if for the rest of the world the Olympic Games represent glorious achievement through sports, for many urban, educated, middle-class Indians, they offer only a ritual wallowing in a feeling of failure.

This feeling comes from a blinkered, not to mention privileged, view of the world. Those experiencing humiliation tend to belong to what used to be called the leisure class; the athlete soldiering on the field is often from poor, disadvantaged strata. The former are unable to comprehend, much less celebrate, the latter’s triumph. Of course, even in years without medals, Indian athletes make important achievements. Sriram Singh, a middle-distance runner at that 1976 Games, never got to the podium, but during his eight-hundred-metre race he broke the record he himself had previously set at the Asian Games. And he started the race at such a clip that his Cuban opponent, Alberto Juantorena, later credited Singh with spurring him to win gold. More striking, here was a runner who was not accustomed to running on a synthetic track, and who did not see one in India until 1982. Things have changed, with more training facilities available to aspiring sportswomen and men, but the bigger truth is that, in a country with endemic poverty, the real glory of the Olympics lies in the individuals who have often overcome huge odds to arrive on the world stage.

There have been many since Singh. At the London Games, in 2012, a flyweight boxer from India named Mary Kom won the bronze medal in her category. This was the first Olympics where women’s boxing had been admitted as a sport, and what was inspiring about Kom’s story was that she was the daughter of landless laborers and had emerged, as the writer Rahul Bhattacharya put it, from a “town so removed from the Indian growth story that aspiration is not even visible on its streets.” Similarly, the archer Deepika Kumari, who competed admirably this year in the Rio Games, was born to parents who live in a village near Ranchi, her father working as an auto-rickshaw driver and her mother a nurse. According to the journalist T. S. Sudhir, Dutee Chand—only the third Indian woman ever to qualify for the hundred-metre sprint—wasn’t sure she would have spikes to run at Rio. She was reported to have said, “I feel like a beggar asking for such things.” I have no doubt that athletes from other countries struggle against such obstacles, too, but it appears to me sometimes that people in India and elsewhere choose to forget all this.

While watching the field-hockey match in Rio between the Indian and U.S. women’s teams, on Thursday, I heard the American commentator on NBC say that even though the Indian players were probably not as fit as their opponents, they weren’t lacking in skills. I wanted to laugh. Earlier, the same commentator, a two-time Olympian for the United States, had said that the American players were equipped with small devices that measured their movements and their level of fatigue. The U.S. coach checked the data from those devices and, accordingly, made substitutions during the game. The commentator then added that the Indian team didn’t use this technology. For the benefit of that NBC commentator, I’m going to spell out a fact that is so obvious that it is almost trite: many of the young women on the Indian team are from villages in the Indian hinterland; several of them, like Sunita Lakra, Deep Grace Ekka, and Lilima Minz, are adivasis, members of the Indian aboriginal population. Those women, it would be safe to extrapolate, wouldn’t have had the benefits of diet, training, or access to equipment that their opponents easily take for granted.

There is no point in fighting condescension with condescension. I’m in the wrong if I have given the impression that Indian athletes don’t win medals. In previous Olympics, the men’s field-hockey team has captured gold eight times. No other country can boast of this kind of success. On the other hand, and this is what causes enormous pain to fans like me, the last time India won an Olympic medal in this sport was in 1980, thirty-six years ago. At the last Olympics, in London, India finished last. In Rio, the Indian men’s team has—I guess the accurate phrase would be—struggled gallantly. They have won twice, first against Ireland and then against Argentina, but they have also lost two well-fought games against more fancied opponents, Germany and then the Netherlands. Their disappointing draw against Canada on Friday, in the final game of the preliminaries, meant that India will next play against Belgium, the top team in Pool A, in the quarter-final.

I have been sweating through India’s matches in Rio, watching the games on live feed, but, now and then, I have also found it necessary to go back to this video on Youtube. It shows highlights of India’s 8–1 victory over Germany in the finals of the 1936 Olympics, played in Hitler’s Berlin. The Indians were led by Dhyan Chand, who is regarded as the best player the game has ever seen, and he scored three goals in the finals. (At the previous Olympics, held in Los Angeles, in 1932, Chand scored eight goals in the match against the host country. India beat the United States 24–1.) In the video, Chand—diminutive and lithe—weaves his way expertly through the opposition: scoring seems not only effortless but inevitable. Victory, he seems to say, was ours before; it will be our lot again. This sort of nostalgia offers a dose of solace, but real history is more complicated. Dhyan Chand’s son, Ashok Kumar, played hockey for India, too, but the team he led to victory in the 1975 Hockey World Cup was the first and last to win that event.

Nostalgia pushes us toward comforting mythologies. Let me return to another moment of early trauma. I wasn’t yet born when a famous Indian athlete named Milkha Singh—“the Flying Sikh”—came fourth in the four-hundred-metre race at the Rome Olympics, in 1960. A few years ago, a blockbuster Bollywood film called “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag” (“Run Milkha Run”) took pains to tell us that the reason Singh had lost was because, just after the halfway mark, he turned back to look at his opponents—and, it would appear from the way the film was edited, at his traumatic childhood, caught in the bloody riots that accompanied the Partition. But he hadn’t. We don’t want to believe that Milkha Singh had simply run out of steam.