Instead of promoting a mass culture of sports, which has proven to produce the best results in Olympics, the Narendra Modi-led government is promoting the corporatisation of sports which is only serving to restrict the masses’ access to sports while handing over our elite athletes to be used by Ambani to promote corporate interests.

FELICITATING our Olympic medalists and making India's bid to host the Olympics in 2036 was neither an elected representative of the people nor a veteran of any sport, but Nita Ambani, wife of India's and Asia's richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose closeness to PM Narendra Modi is no secret.

Advancing his strategic capture of the country, from its economic assets such as oil and telecom to the largest bulk of its news and entertainment industry, Ambani's corporate empire Reliance is aggressively moving on sports, extending its tentacles to ensnare the future of Indian Olympics.

The India House, "a home away from home" built in Paris to host Indian athletes, fans and media, and "showcase India to the world", was financed by the Reliance Foundation and inaugurated by its chairperson, Nita Ambani.

She is the first and the only person with no background in sports to represent India in the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Described on the Olympics website as the "very heart of world sport", the committee leads the Olympic movement.

Among its 111 members, Ambani's profile page listing out her achievements on the Olympics website stands out conspicuously for its absence of two categories listed on the pages of nearly all other members: ‘Sports Practised’ and ‘Sports Career’.  

Under the category of ‘Sports Administration’, other members have a list of their leaderships and memberships of various national and international sporting federations or national Olympic associations to show as accomplishments on their page.

The description of Nita Ambani’s accomplishments in the Sports Administration category on her page is essentially a Reliance advertisement placed on the Olympics website, flaunting mostly its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects promoting sports.      

With "no experience in Sports Administration," she was "elevated to the top most arena" in this field of work in what was effectively her first stint, complained Leslie Xavier, a sports journalist with over 10 years of experience competing in wrestling and judo at the national level.

Countries want a former sportsperson with experience in administering national sporting bodies to represent them in the IOC, "because the position requires a nuanced understanding of sports and sporting culture of the country," he said. It is "unprecedented" to place in the high position of IOC "a person with no sports background at all”.

The handling of the problems faced by Indian athletes under her leadership did not reflect well on her competence. The underfloor cooling mechanism and built-in insulation installed in place of air-conditioning by France to minimise the carbon footprint was unable to keep the Olympic Village cool amid the heat wave that had gripped Paris.

Several countries including the US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Britain, Greece and Italy had made arrangements in advance to ensure that portable ACs were provided in the rooms of their athletes from the first day. But Indian athletes were left sweltering for over a week till the sports ministry sent 40 portable AC units for the 117 athletes representing the country.

"How difficult was it to check the temperature before the athletes arrived in their rooms? These are the sort of things that should have been handled at the level of India's IOC member” and the Indian Olympics Association (IOA) which elects our representative to the IOC, Xavier said.

The IOA elected Nita Ambani to the IOC first in 2016 and re-elected her again ahead of the Paris Olympics 2024. These elections are supposed to happen without any political interference. “But in India, most of our top sporting federations are led by politicians. Although the IOA is not headed by a politician, there is a lot of political wrangling within. The ruling party obviously has a say in it. IOA works very closely with the sports ministry," he added. 

IN THE SHADOW OF THE WRESTLERS’ PROTEST

The IOA is presided by PT Usha - winner of 4 gold medals and 7 silver medals in the Asian Games, but better remembered for her performance in the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, when she missed the bronze by a mere 100th of a second.

Nominated to Rajya Sabha by the BJP in 2022, the legend of Indian Olympics fell from national grace in 2023 when she accused Olympic medal-winning wrestlers – Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Mallik and Bajrang Punia – of “indiscipline” for launching an agitation last year against the systematic sexual abuse by the then president of the Wrestling Federation of India (WRI) and BJP MP, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.

A teary-eyed Mallik announced she was dropping out from wrestling later that year after Brij Bhushan’s aide, Sanjay Singh, became the president of WFI. Punia is currently under suspension by the world wrestling body under contested circumstances. Vinesh Phogat, however, persisted in the Olympics in Paris. With a natural weight of 57 kg, she wanted to wrestle in the 53 kg category. But the WFI, now led by Brij Bhushan’s minion, denied her the opportunity, forcing her to wrestle in the 50 kg category or drop out of the contest.

Phogat drastically shed her weight down to 50, and wrestled down to the mat a hitherto undefeated Japanese champion and Tokyo Olympics Gold medalist, Yui Sasaki, before going on to win the quarter finals and the semi finals, becoming the first Indian women wrestler to make it to the Olympic finals. But on the day she was set to wrestle for gold, Phogat was disqualified for weighing 100 grams above 50 kg, even after undertaking weight-cutting measures so extreme that her coach feared that “she might die”.

In her statement to reassure Phogat, "We are all with you," said Nita, against whose surname slogans resonated at all borders of Delhi during the successful agitation against farm laws by the farmers’ movement, which later mobilised in defense of the protesting wrestlers when they were faced with police action.

Less than a week after Ambani’s reassuring words for Phogat, ahead of the verdict by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on the appeal against her disqualification, PT Usha turned on Phogat and her coach, blaming them for 100 extra grams. She then expressed "shock and disappointment” after the CAS rejected her appeal.

Questions over possible ‘sabotage’ against Phogat, raised by many including boxer Vijender Singh who had won bronze in 2008, do not reflect well on Nita Ambani or the IOA through which she was elected to the IOC with no experience.

Neither does her election to the IOC “reflect well on India’s voting culture when someone with no experience in sports gets into that kind of a position,” Xavier remarked.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Concerns over the potential for conflict of interest also arise with Nita Ambani sitting on the IOC from which Viacom 18, owned by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance, secured exclusive rights to broadcast Olympic games.

The national broadcaster Doordarshan’s rights were not secured by the government, leaving it unable to broadcast live, except through a sub-licensing agreement on a DD dish which cost the viewer Rs 2000 to buy and set up. This effectively forced India’s fans who wanted to cheer their athletes to subscribe to Viacom 18’s OTT platform Jio Cinema or its channel Sports 18.  

Ambani's Viacom 18 wielding digital streaming rights over the Indian Premier League (IPL), where it has a team, and exclusive media rights over the football equivalent of IPL, the Indian Super League (ISL), which is practically owned by Reliance, is a different matter, explains Xavier. "Professional sporting leagues in India follow the American model, which is completely corporatised and profit-oriented. But the Olympic Movement is not like that, even in the US," he said, adding that from national sentiments to geopolitical clout, there are much larger stakes in the Olympics.

CORPORATISATION WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF UNDERFUNDING

While many nevertheless welcome the corporatisation of India’s Olympic contingent on the grounds that it will bring money into the underfunded Indian sports, Xavier argues that such reasoning is based on a misunderstanding of where the underfunding lies. The top athletes and their training is reasonably well-funded by the government, i.e., by taxpayers, including through the Khelo India programme. Additional support is also made available by private corporations, most prominently through the Sports Excellence Program by Jindal's JSW. But these programmes target sportspersons "who have already demonstrated potential at the junior level internationally," he added.

Underfunding is a problem suffered at the grassroots, where, in the act of daily play, children discover their athletic skills and develop ambitions to compete internationally. However, in the absence of financial support, the vast majority of youngsters with the will and the genes to become elite athletes are forced to drop out young. The corporate model of financing sports, he explained, cannot solve this problem because there is no profit in investing at this grassroots level where the bulk of the athletic potential of the country is wasted.

Instead, the corporatisation of sports – which at the level of the Olympics manifested in the form of capture by Ambani – is at the grassroots shrinking the public spaces available to play. In metropolitan cities, public playgrounds are disappearing at an alarming pace. Privatised and monetised like all other public goods, parks and playgrounds that remain outside the gated communities, where the vast masses of children from poor or lower-middle class families grow up, are pay-to-use.

With their families unable to pay, the right to play is simply denied to them. Sport is increasingly becoming a privilege of the upper classes, even though the vast majority of our greatest sportspersons and athletes have come from the toiling masses.

WE NEED A MASS CULTURE OF SPORTS

The modern Olympics, beginning in 1896, was originally envisioned as a ‘gentleman’s sport’, limited to the aristocracy and emerging bourgeoisie. This class-based restriction on participation was enforced under the cover of reserving the games to amateurs by keeping out the professionals, i.e., those who are paid for competing. Without pay, the vast masses could not afford the time or money to play and train and consume the proper diet.

It was the Soviet Union that first launched athletes from the working class and the peasantry onto the Olympic stage in the second half of the twentieth century.

Proponents of what is called the “triangle” theory of sports, the Soviets had a policy of heightening the peak of the triangle, i.e., increasing the number and quality of the country’s elite athletes at the level of the Olympics – by widening the triangle’s base by increasing the participation and training of the masses at the grassroots level.

The success of this strategy is evident in the result it produced. Although short-lived and gone now for more than 30 years, the Soviet Union, which had participated in only 19 Olympic games, still ranks second – second only to the US which, however, has participated in 54 Olympic games.

This success was accomplished by creating a mass culture of sports through what were called “Physical Culture Kollektives” that were formed to organise training and competition not only in schools, colleges and neighborhoods but also in factories, offices, State-owned and collective farms, etc. This required an enormous public expenditure by the State, which was justified not only by the number of Olympic medals won but also by the physical capacity it helped build among the populace, creating stronger workers, farmers and soldiers. 

However, the Indian State, like most others in the global south that have undergone neoliberal reforms, is structurally incapable of undertaking such an expenditure because it has lost the ability to bend the capital to serve the interests of the people.

Compelled instead by capital to arm-twist the people into serving its interest, the Indian State is taking the opposite route of corporatising sports, which is restricting access of the masses to sports at the grassroots, while handing over our elite athletes to be used by billionaires to brand their corporations.