It’s a bleak winter in a small town in Germany but the conditions for training for the Beijing Olympics are the best. The months of seclusion with no distractions eventually helped Abhinav Bindra get into the zone and the world-class support systems during training were instrumental in his achieving peak form to perform the way he did to win India’s first individual Olympic gold.

Welcome to the new India.
An India where our top athletes travel the world, not to sightsee, but to get the best possible training the globe has to offer. An India where athletes from all backgrounds have the luxury of financial and organisational support from not-for-profit sports funds like the Mittal Trust, Olympic Gold Quest and Gosports and support from coaches focused on bringing out their wards potential.

Over and above this is the changed mindset of a government willing to spend serious money on our top athletes in the hope of finishing in the top rungs of the medal tally table at the Commonwealth, Asian and Olympic Games.

We are no longer the country that has the potential to be a world power, but are being viewed as a nation that has ‘arrived’. And how! The positive attitude of the more liberalised world has also come to our country in the recent past, even if it has taken a while since the economy opened up in the ’90s.

We are today living in an India where the psychological timidity afflicting previous generations has been replaced with an almost brazen conviction and mental fortitude that we are or can become the best in the world in any field of human endeavor.

This new-found confidence combined with financial and psychological boldness has permeated into the sporting arena too and be it a Bindra or Gagan Narang in shooting, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi and Somdev Devvarman in tennis, Viswanathan Anand in chess, Saina Nehwal in badminton, Vijender Singh, Suronjoy and M.C. Mary Kom in boxing, Pankaj Advani and Aditya Mehta in billiards & snooker, Preeja Sreedharan in athletics, Arjun Atwal and Jeev Milkha Singh in golf or for that matter Ashish Kumar, that gutsy and disciplined youngster who won for himself and for his country the very first medal at the Asian Games in gymnastics, these are all names who believe that they are world beaters and have a deep underlying conviction in their abilities and in their support systems.

The Indian Premier League was the trend setter in many ways. It opened up not only avenues for Indians and international players to earn money more in keeping with their popularity and mass appeal but also gave our sportsmen much-needed financial independence.

The IPL also brought in great changes in the way sport is marketed. Like the economic liberalisation, this was opening up of sport in the country, with India taking the lead in the world in marketing a cricket league. In many ways, IPL is the great liberator of Indian sport.

There is also the other sporting India. In stark contrast to the riches of the cricketers and also Abhinav Bindra’s affluence is Tintu Luka, being trained by P.T. Usha in her Usha School of Athletics. Tintu comes from the humblest background but that has not prevented her from receiving the best training.

The role of government, mostly ridiculed and criticised in the past, deserves some praise today. Scandals during the Commonwealth Games and in most instances where large outlays for infrastructure development are earmarked notwithstanding, Government put in place incentives for our sportspersons as far back as 1987. A `2 lakh bonus for the Asian Games gold then has kept pace with inflation and is today `20 lakh for a gold at the Asian Games and `1 crore for an Olympic gold. These are tax-free, and even the coaches are being rewarded. This positive shift in stance and thinking by Government is praiseworthy and has helped in constantly motivating our athletes and the coaches who train them.

The correlation between money and performance in the sporting arena is well documented. In 1998 India’s sports budget was `150 crore. China whose sports budget was an equivalent of `1,500 crore took home 10 times the number of medals won by India at the Asian Games in Bangkok that year. And it is this correlation, which is visible in the results in subsequent Asian Games and the Olympics.

When I went to defend my world billiards title in Belfast in 1987, I did not get a $10 (that was the amount our sports ministry thought was appropriate for a world champion to look after his incidental expenses) foreign exchange sanction by the ministry in time which meant that either I took money bought in the black market, stuff it in my socks and take it out illegally out of the country, or suffer the humiliation of living for 12 days in Belfast at the mercy of the organisers. I will leave the reader to guess which of the two options I chose.

Various draconian and limiting laws of our country at the time including the feared foreign exchange regime and lack of adequate funding from the sports ministry were partly responsible for inducing a gloomy outlook and a lack of self worth and self-esteem in our sportspersons. The old, conservative India was too constraining.

I must mention here that the $10 sanction was a permission by government to me to buy the $10 with MY OWN money. And even that they could not process in time. It is a tribute to our athletes of the past that they defied these odds and yet managed to win world titles and medals albeit infrequently.

Cut to 2010 and our top-level junior sportspersons are being given grants of up to `5 lakh for training abroad and of course they all carry international credit cards. Successful athletes must live lifestyles befitting their achievements in their sport and that is what Indian sport has managed to achieve in the last 20 years.

In coming years, I sense that the spillover effect of our economic boom on sport will see us bettering our performances at the world stage in most sport and by 2020 our Olympic medal haul will be well into double digits. From here, progress is the only option.

Geet Sethi, six-time world professional billiards champion and thrice winner of the amateur world title, has been active on the sporting scene for close to 40 years. He is also the author of the bestseller Success vs. Joy, an inspirational book on mind control.