If We Want To Win at OLYMPICS

India's first individual gold medal at the Olympics has sent the nation into raptures. And why not? It has come after we've participated in 21 Olympic Games - if you don't count Norman Pritchard's two silver medals in the 1900 Games, which were till recently credited to British India - over 88 years.

That's not saying much for a billion-plus nation and an emerging economic powerhouse. India's solitary gold, however, brings into sharp relief something that many, including gold medallist Abhinav Bindra, have asked: Why on earth did it take so long?

The usual suspects are poor infrastructure, government apathy and lack of a sporting culture. All of these are regularly trotted out - and have in some measure contributed - to explain India's poor showing in sports. But can this change?

There are broadly two models that India can look to if it wants to improve its showing in the Olympics and in sports in general.

One is the spectacularly successful Chinese model.

We tend to forget that China's first Olympic gold medal came as recently as the 1984 Games. Since then China has catapulted to the top of the medals tally with 32 golds in the last Games, only four behind the US. It has managed this by strategically focusing on lower profile but medal-rich sports such as weightlifting, shooting and rowing besides its traditional strengths in gymnastics, diving and table tennis.

China has also focused on women athletes who are usually funded less elsewhere. In the Athens Games, women won two-thirds of China's medals. There is, however, a big problem with China's sports programme. Its blueprint for sporting success is a throwback to the Soviet era where young athletes were subject to brutal training regimes.

China has pumped in billions of dollars into its 3,000-odd state-run academies where children as young as six or seven years are inducted and trained with the single-minded goal of becoming champions. Many have described this system as a form of athletic servitude. This is, of course, very much part of China's efforts to assert national pride through sporting glory.

Indeed, as early as 1917 Mao Zedong had written, "If our bodies are not strong, how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?"

It's little known that China's supremacy in table tennis was the outcome of a conscious decision to develop the sport once the International Table Tennis Federation in 1953 severed ties with Taiwan. In 1959, China's Rong Guotuan became world champion prompting Mao to call the victory a "spiritual nuclear weapon".

The other model is the American one where there is no centralised system but a highly competitive school and university sports structure, which throws up great athletes. Since there is little involvement of the state, except for the government's funding of public colleges and schools and athletic scholarships, the US tends to excel in sports that are popular with Americans such as running, swimming or basketball rather than disciplines like shooting or archery.

In such a decentralised system, athletes can't be pushed beyond a limit. As Bela Karolyi, the coach of legendary Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci and later the US team, said of the Chinese methods, "Can you imagine if we plucked our girls out of their homes when they were five or six, then kept and trained them and never let them go home? We'd have a hundred lawyers knocking on our doors."

In Europe, countries like the former West Germany have long had a tradition of local sports clubs that nurtured world-class athletes.

But now that unified Germany has been slipping in the Olympic medals tally, it has revived the moribund sports schools of East Germany. The German government is pouring funds into elite sports schools to produce Olympic champions.

Other high achievers in Olympics such as Australia - which gets a disproportionate number of medals for its 21 million population - and Japan have also put in plenty of government money in sports programmes. Obviously, a centralised structure has its attractions.

In India, a coercive national sports machinery, such as in China or the former Soviet bloc, is neither desirable nor practical. Unlike rich countries, state-funded sports schools have had limited success in India. This is to be expected in a country where the state can't even provide basic education to all its citizens.

And though the Indian government does provide jobs as well as university seats to sportspersons, this is often seen as an end in itself rather than a means to sporting achievement.

Are we then doomed to be a nation of sporting failures, except for occasional success in cricket and hockey? Not necessarily. India could easily focus on a few among the 28 Olympic disciplines to help it make it to the medals tally.

Incredible as it may sound, India once had a robust club structure which threw up great hockey players, including Dhyan Chand, and footballers. There's no reason why they can't be revived. Private companies and trusts could easily pitch in as they've started doing in a small way in the last few years. And nothing succeeds like success. Just look at the rush for rifles in Punjab ever since Bindra won the gold.

There's only so much that the system -unless it's an authoritarian one - can do to improve a country's sporting achievements. Bindra won the gold without any government backing. A Michael Phelps or any of the Ethiopian or Brazilian greats who run or dribble their way out of poverty are not products of a national system. They are sportspersons with an exceptional hunger for success.

That is something that no government - coercive or otherwise - can produce.