Medals Are Manufactured, Not Discovered

India's Institutional Blind Spot

- Pushpinder Singh Gill

India does not lack sporting talent. It lacks sporting institutions. This distinction is uncomfortable because talent is romantic while institutions are tedious. Talent produces heroes; institutions produce outcomes. Yet every Olympic medal table, every international ranking, and every post-Games review points to the same conclusion: countries that win consistently do not stumble upon success, they design it.

India, including states with deep sporting traditions such as Punjab, still relies on individual brilliance to compensate for systemic weakness. That approach has reached its limit.

Population is often offered as an explanation, but it collapses under scrutiny. South Korea, with about 52 million people, has won over 300 Olympic medals. Britain, with roughly 67 million, moved from mid-table obscurity in the 1990s to consistent top-five finishes within two decades. India, with 1.4 billion people, remains stuck in single-digit medal counts at most Olympics and fewer than forty Olympic gold medals in total. This is not a demographic failure. It is an institutional one.

Modern competitive sport is no longer a test of effort alone; it is an industrial process. Performance now emerges from the integration of infrastructure, sports science, education, technology, research and governance into a single operating system. Training is data-driven, recovery is measured, injuries are predicted rather than merely treated, and coaching is regulated by evidence. India, however, still treats sport largely as an extracurricular extension of education rather than as a serious knowledge enterprise.

Facilities exist, schemes exist, athletes exist-but the system connecting them does not.

The experience of Korea National Sport University shows what happens when that system is deliberately built. Korea did not try to dominate every sport. It focused on selected individual disciplines where marginal gains translated into podium finishes.