Neeraj Chopra clinched a gold medal for 139 crore Indians and made us proud. India has won 7 medals and is ranked in the top 50 (48th position to be precise) at the Tokyo Olympics. As we deservedly cheer our medalists, let us do some reality checks:

  • While we keep telling our children that India is soon going to be the next super-power, we could manage a grand total of 7 medals from a population of 139 crores. This is our best ever performance in the Olympics. Now, if you say that performance in sports is not a direct indicator of a country’s progress, I will quietly shut up.
  • Small countries like Cuba, Slovenia, Uzbekistan with very limited resources have bagged more medals than India.

It’s not that our sportsmen and youth have been lacking in any way to perform at the highest sporting event. The fact is that we as a nation have failed our youth. We have failed in giving them the opportunities and the platforms to rise from the grassroots level to the international level. It’s not about just throwing in money to create infrastructure and resources. It’s more about having the vision and the genuine will to bring out excellence from people. And, as a nation, we are seriously lacking it; not today, but since independence.

Comparatively, I find that Indian cricket has created more democratic opportunities and platforms for talented youth from the grassroots levels to rise to the national and international levels. That is the reason we see India dominating the cricketing world.

The Olympics has always interested me since childhood. I find it to be the highest celebration of human capabilities. Every 4 years, we surpass our bodily capabilities and set new performance records which until a few years back seemed impossible to achieve. It enthrals me when a Ugandan or an Ethiopian wins gold.

This time, the Olympics got me fascinated with a 30-year-old woman from Austria – Anna Kiesenhofer. Anna won the gold in women’s cycling- a sport intensely competed and dominated by the British, German, French and Dutch. Let me share some interesting facts about her:

  • Anna Kiesenhofer is a scientist by profession. She studied mathematics at Vienna (2008-11), completed her masters at Cambridge University (2011-12) and earned her PhD at Catalonia- Spain (2016) with her thesis on Integrable systems on b-symplectic manifolds (whatever it means for us!). 
  • Anna is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Switzerland and is part of a group researching nonlinear partial differential equations which arise in mathematical physics.
  • She participated and won in triathlons and duathlons in 2012 and 2013 but had to stop running due to an injury. So, from 2014 she took to cycling.
  • In 2015 she participated and won in a cyclo-sports event- the Gran Fondo New York (120 km). In 2016, she won another cycling event- Coupe d’Espagne.
  • Since 2017, Anna has not been a part of any pro-cycling team due to her professional commitments as a scientist, mathematician and lecturer.
  • She trained herself after office hours. She did not have a coach or a support team. She planned her own training, diet and race strategy. I can feel the influence of her mathematical intellect coming into action here.

Indeed, Anna Kiesenhofer is a real-life wonder woman. Such is the capability of the human spirit that decides to live a life beyond ordinary!