Abhinav Bindra Highlights India’s Need To Look At Sport Holistically, Not From Prism Of High-Performance

Bengaluru: The country’s most decorated shooter Abhinav Bindra on Thursday stressed that for India to progress as a sporting nation it must create a sustainable and thriving ecosystem and stop looking at sports from the narrow lens of high performance. Bindra is India’s first individual Olympic champion when he won a shooting gold in 2008.

“What I would really like to see India as a country is to start looking at sport more holistically and not singularly from the prism of high performance. It is a very narrow view and if you only look at it from a high-performance perspective, it will be very challenging to make that next leap from seven Olympic medals in Tokyo,” said Bindra at the RCB Innovation Lab’s Leaders Meet India.

Bindra said if India aspires to become a sporting superpower then the investment has to be holistic. “If you want to get to 50 it is not just going to be pumping money into the elite. It is only going to be a very small percentage of your population that is going to get involved in sports, so you need more people to play and the by-product of that hopefully will be that more people will be involved in sport.

“So I believe that the shift in perspective needs to happen and it needs to happen now,” he added. The 41-year-old, who has secured India’s only gold medal in shooting at the Olympics to date, also talked about the country potentially hosting the prestigious multi-sport tournament as well as the Youth Olympics Games.

“I think giving more opportunities to young people to simply enjoy sport is that to me an important element that has to be developed for the whole Olympic project. The number two point is developing an economy for the future. The whole country needs to be involved in not just celebrating Indian success but also celebrating sports.”

“If you have that larger goal in mind and you have this more holistic thought process in mind, I think you come up with an interesting project that will not just be limited to the two weeks of sports, but to how the Olympic Games can truly be the driver for real change,” he said.