Commonwealth Games: A numbers perspective

I have been itching to write this blog entry from the time Commonwealth Games 2010,Delhi came to a close. I will not be giving any gyaan on how a certain Suresh Kalmadi was made the scapegoat of a highly corrupt and inefficient state machinery and nor try and explore the reasons why sewage system of games village was blocked.

What I will be doing is presenting plain simple facts and numbers most of you would have come across but probably wouldn’t have had enough time to play around with and analyze.

Fact Number 1: There were a total of 272 gold medals at stake in the games out of which a whopping 56 were in Aquatics alone, athletics was the next to follow with 52 gold medals at stake. Australia won 21 golds alone in swimming!

Fact Number 2: Australia’s overall medal tally went down by 20%  from 2006 games where they had won 221 medals  to 177 medals in CWG 2010. India on the other hand almost doubled their games medal tally to 101 medals compared to 51 medals in 2006. Canada’s total medal count went down by 13%.

Fact Number 3: Out of 52 medals in athletics Kenya alone won 12 gold medals in running events.

Fact Number 4: Indian shooters grabbed 14 golds out of a total of 34 Gold Medals at stake in shooting.


Fact Number 5: India won astounding 10 Gold Medals in wrestling, collecting nearly half of the 21 Gold medals on stake across various categories .

Fact Number 6: Northern Ireland despite sending out an overall weak contingent for the games pipped India for the top spot in boxing events with 3 golds and 2 silvers compared to host nation’s 3 golds and 3 bronze.

My take on above numbers:

#1. Nations which one would term as developed, having a good sports infrastructure and conducive to development of sports etc. have actually dropped down in their share of medals and so called “Third World” countries have been catching up fast.

#2. India finished second in the overall medals tally owing to more number of gold medals as compared to England but we need to start focussing on the right games to get closer to Australia, we can no longer ignore Aquatics and Athletics with as many as 108 gold medals on stake out of total 272.

  Is this the state of Indian Swimming?

#3. Do Infrastructure and the amount of money which goes into the sport academies etc., really have a big role to play in number of medals earned at international sporting events? I agree that they do have a correlation with performance in long term, but what explains excellent showing of countries like Nigeria and Kenya?

 Kenya won 12 Gold Medals in running events

#4. Indian shooters and boxers have become major contributors to India’s medal tally at International sporting events but it is to be seen for how long will the dragon be silent in these two sports and let countries like India walk away with medals.

#5. Indian culture of breeding pehalwaans in akhada’s since ages is finally paying off, the next step needs to be to introduce wrestling on mats in all of these akhadas(many of them have already adopted) to make India a wrestling powerhouse like Eastern European countries.

The Age Old Indian Akhaadas are finally showing their worth

#6. Indian women won 13 gold medals in total compared to 6 golds in 2006 edition, which is a heartening fact for a nation that has taken more than two decades to get women reservation bill passed in its parliament.

#7. Our performance in athletics deserves a special mention with our athletes gathering as many as 12 medals (2 gold,3 silver and 7 bronze), this surely is a key takeaway for India from these games.

#8. And finally with all due to respect to all the athletes who took part in the games, the games were nowhere close to being a world class event.A look at comparison of games timings with Olympics and world record timings tells how substandard is the level of these games compared to other international events.

Swimming -Men’s 200 m breaststroke 1:55.58 (CWG 2010): 1:53.94(Olympics 2008)
Swimming -Men’s 400 m freestyle 4:05.7 (CWG 2010): 3:41.86(Olympics 2008)
Track and Field: Men’s 200 m 20.45 (CWG 2010): 19.30 (Olympics 2008)
Track and Field :Men’s 800 m 1:46.60 (CWG 2010): 1:44.65(Olympics 2008)
Track and Field: 400 m Hurdles 48.52 (CWG 2010): 47.25 (Olympics 2008)

  The Perennial Question

But without getting into the above debate further the silver lining is that these games could indeed be a turning point in Indian sports history pretty much like the 1996 Cricket World Cup was for Indian Cricket, but then instead of resting on laurels of CWG 2010 we need to get ready for 2016 Olympics at Rio because London 2012 are too close to expect any miracles.

Though special attention is needed towards development of sporting infrastructure and bringing in sponsorship for our athletes, money spent necessarily does not translate to number of medals won.
A very peculiar case supporting the over argument is that of England, England won only one more gold medal than they did in CWG 2006 inspite of spending close to 500 million pounds in preparation for CWG 2010.

Time to put money to Social Causes?

That amount of exorbitant money for one gold medal surely doesn't seem right, some of us may argue that 4 years is too short a time for any kind of substantial results to show up but one cannot rule out the possibility of this correlation.

We need to learn from mistakes of others and need to realize that building passion for sports is equally important as building up infrastructure for sports.

A whole lot of questions still lurk over the performance of India in sporting events and it would be interesting to see how things shape up in future.