How India can learn from Australia’s Olympic success

From the editor’s desk

It has been a great outcome for Australia at the 2024 Paris Olympics, culminating with the enviable total of 53 medals—18 gold, 19 silver, and 16 bronze. Naturally, all of this goes far beyond flaunting some individual athletic talent and has to do with structured and purposive investing years ago by the country in the sound development of a sports ecosystem. For a country like India, full of potential but relatively frugal with Olympic successes, there is much to learn from Australian success in enhancing its sports performance at the international level.

Among the more basic reasons behind the Australian Olympic success is the heavy investment made in sports infrastructure. State-of-the-art sports facilities and training centres have been created to provide the best possible environment for training and development to athletes. They are truly worldclass facilities, not confined only to metropolitan cities, but span the length and breadth of the country, providing access to quality training facilities for people from all regions within a country. While India has been rapidly developing its sports infrastructure in the recent past, there is still some distance to be covered before quality training facilities become ubiquitous in the country. This will help bridge the gap with India's commitment to enhanced investment in sports infrastructure, with a special focus on regions left behind, to tap into talent that is sitting all around.

The success of Australia can also be traced back to its highly efficient programs in talent identification and development.

The Australians identify athletes from a tender age, nurture them, and place them under specialized coaching. This acts as early intervention to provide the right kind of guidance and support needed to make champions out of mere potential. In contrast, most of India's talent identification processes are fragmented and non-systematic to capture the vast potential pool of athletes in the country. What India needs is nationwide talent identification programs that, with robust support systems at the grassroots level, can identify and nurture the next generation of Olympic athletes.

The other fundamental in the sports ecosystem in Australia relates to making sure that there are holistic support systems for the athletes. There exist numerous support services surrounding the Australian sports programs, such as sports psychologists, nutritionists, and medical professionals. Indeed, it is the availability of such resources which makes it possible for athletes to keep good physical and mental shape hence enabling their performance during competitions. These facilities are not available to the Indian athletes on consistent terms, thereby creating drawbacks causing poor performance at international platforms. What India needs to do is to initiate and develop broad-based support systems for the athlete so that athletes get due care and guidance necessary to excel at the highest level.

High-performance programs, including that at Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), have been instrumental in what success Australia has achieved at the Olympic Games. This focused attention on state-ofthe-art training techniques and the best sports science is backed by ongoing research aimed at maximizing the performance of its athletes. In India, there has been some progress toward this through schemes such as Target Olympic Podium Scheme; however, there remains great scope for further improvement. Setting up more highperformance training centers all over India on the lines of the successful AIS and providing Indian athletes with specialized training and resources can help them excel in the international arena.

Another strong contributory factor for Australia's Olympic success is its high sporting culture. Sports is imbued within Australian life— there is wide participation, accompanied by support from both the public and private sectors. This has built the culture of sportsmanship and competitiveness that instils a feeling of pride and a will to excel among the athletes. While the sporting history has been rich for India, more cultural development is needed to focus on the importance of sporting activities from grassroots to professional levels. This can be done through public campaigns that must create more awareness, gain more media coverage for other sports, and encourage sporting activities from an early age.

What will help India repeat the success of Australia the most is the establishment of a partnership between the government and the private sector. Public-private partnerships concerning sports development have benefited Australia greatly in areas such as financing, managing, and implementing programs related to sports.