Hitting the Gold's Eye

After every 4 years, India looks forward to the Olympics with hope that at least one sportsman will return with a Gold medal but till the finale of the competition our expectations are gets curtailed to "At least a one Medal". But finally it came to an unassuming young man. Yes, Abhinav Bindra's Beijing 2008 Olympic Gold in 10 m Air Rifle ended the 28 years old dry spell. Bindra's 10.8 points winning final shot left the defending champion & silver medalist Qinan Zhu in tears and bagged the India's first ever individual Gold in the 108 years old modern Olympics history. Surely India is not going to forget the name of this hero forever.
But on the other note this moment tickled my mind to think why it taken so long time to came in to reality. Definitely credit goes to Abhinav's determination, grueling efforts & the killer instinct. But then is it mean that previous Olympians lacked these properties? definitely not. Then whats the difference this time? Along with the personal physical and mental efforts there is a need of money and stability to facilitate the basic needs and sporting paraphernalia. Games like shooting needs a lot of investment in terms of shooting ranges, guns and ammunition, whereas it lacks the financial benefits as that of in games like Cricket. Sportsman needs financial stability to fully concentrate on his practice. Fortunately such stability is their in case of Abhinav. Thanks to his personal shooting range in the backyard of his home which is fully financed by his family, where he closeted himself for eight hours of a day for his passion. But everybody is not lucky enough. In India most of the sports other than Cricket are surviving on the funds by Government. Which made the things even worse. When you have future of the sports decided by the babus, netas and bureaucrats you will only get hefty reports, not the winning ideas. Abhinav's gold further proved that in India good things can only happen when their is a private initiative. The best example could be IPL 2008 where the private initiative set the ball rolling for cricket. It also opened more opportunities for the talent which is going to be ignored. But its the misery of the other sports that they are treated like an orphan in this Cricket crazy nation. Many businessmen, film stars are ready to pour millions on Cricket, many state governments poured millions on 20-20 World Champion Indian team but Indian hockey team's Asia cup winning triumph went unnoticed. I really feel pitty when the worlds most popular game like Football has no value in India. I yet not heard any big motivational steps for the AFC Challenge cup winning Indian football team.
At least from now we have to take lesson from this, that more and more private initiative need to come up. Abhinav himself quoted this in his blog & its really a need for the survival of the other sports. Corporates should establish the trusts like Laxmi Mittal's 'Champion's trust' which will help to remove the tag of "OTHER SPORTS" which I have used throughout this article. I conclude my blog with the hope that in distinct future we'll see more and more corporate trusts which will create abundant sporting talent which will never let India starved for the medal.