Why can't 1.22 billion Indians win more Olympic medals?

There's a reason why Indians do badly in sports that require high levels of physical fitness

ONE of the most lavish parties thrown in London this week to mark the start of the Olympic Games was that hosted by the London-based Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal for India's Olympic team. It was in effect a celebration of a larger investment that the billionaire has made in Indian athletics.

Since 2005, he has been funding the $10 million Mittal Champions Trust to support 10 Indian athletes with "world beating potential". However, it's a risky investment in an historically feeble enterprise. For India, despite its vast population (1.22 billion at the last count) and genetic diversity, has had an astonishingly unimpressive record in international athletic achievement. Mittal started his trust after seeing India win only one medal each year at the Games in 1996 (bronze), 2000 (bronze) and 2004 (silver). In Beijing in 2008, the Indian team won three medals including a gold, but was ranked 50th among all the nations participating, behind tiny countries like Belgium, Finland and the Dominican Republic. So why is India so bad at games, with the obvious exceptions of cricket, hockey and, to a lesser extent, squash? Although people like to explain it in terms of poor sports infrastructure and the corruption that undoubtedly afflicts sports administration in India, it is much more a matter of culture.

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a former corporate lawyer, is now a freelance journalist. Before becoming a feature writer at the Daily Mail, he worked for several years at the New York Post where he served as a film critic, leader writer, columnist and 'embedded' war correspondent. He has also been published in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.