by Rajat Subhra Chatterjee
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Paris says goodbye with flower petals strewn all over the city with joy and panache. A skydiving Tom Cruise and others, in a bid to prove that topping Paris is not ‘Mission Impossible’ in Los Angeles in 2028, excitement starts mounting. Tom Cruise took the Olympic Flag from star gymnast Simone Biles, fixed it on the back of his motor bike ‘Top Gun’ style and vanished out of the arena.
With this ending, we Indians find some near misses in this Olympics hard to swallow. That Mental Strength is more important along with physical abilities and talent to convert a 4th position or Bronze winning situation to Gold situation has come up the surface. Missing the 3rd position narrowly or through miffed chances due to unstable mind set, pains. The pain in finishing 4th in an Olympic final by a whisker has been plaguing India now for over six decades.
Flying Sikh Milkha Singh was sure to win a medal in the Rome Olympics in 1960 but he finished fourth on a photo finish to Malcom Spence of South Africa. It was heartbreak for millions of Indians.
Gurbachan Singh Randhawa at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, clocked 14.2 secs in the heats to qualify for the semi-finals. The finals were held within 45 minutes after the semis and Randhawa clocked 14.00 secs still to finish fifth in the race.
PT Usha, the “Payyoli Express”, narrowly missed the Bronze in 1984 at Los Angeles in the 400 meters hurdles, by just 1/100th of a second. Superlative performance yet not achieving the ultimate.
Unfortunately, there have been several instances when Indians have come within touching distances of a medal but failed to win it. At the Paris 2024 Olympics, India had six fourth place-finishes.
Arjun Babuta – men’s 10m air rifle shooting finished fourth in the final with a total of 208.4. Croatia’s Miran Maricic made the medal cutoff with a score of 209.8.
Dhiraj Bommadevara/Ankita Bhakat – mixed team archery finished fourth in the mixed team archery event. In the bronze medal match against the US pair Ellison and Kaufhold, the India duo lost 6-2.
Manu Bhaker – Women’s 25m air pistol missed out on a hat-trick of medals when she narrowly missed out on a bronze. Despite occupying the top three places for most of the final, a poor series towards the closing stages saw her drop to fourth place after a shoot-off with Veronika Major of Hungary.
Meerabai Chanu – Weightlifter Chanu finished fourth in the women’s 49kg category. She lifted a total of 199 kg (88+111) to finish at the fourth spot, missing the Olympic medal by only one kg.
Lakshya Sen missed a historic men’s singles bronze medal in badminton after losing to Lee Zii Jia of Malaysia. Lakshya Sen, suffered a 13-21, 21-16, 21-11 loss in 71 minutes. Despite outclassing his opponent in the first game, Sen conceded eight straight points to Zii Jia to lose the second game. He couldn’t mentally recover in the third game and the Malaysian dictated the rallies in the decider to win the bronze medal. Lakshya Sen had beaten Lee Zii Jia at the All England Open earlier this year.
Maheswari Chouhan and Anant Jit Singh – In the shooting skit team event, they missed out the Bronze loosing the match to China by a mere one point ( 44-43 ) . Imagine
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Some other notable misses of the Bronze by Indians in Olympics would be interesting.
Indian Football Team – Melbourne 1956 Olympics – lost the bronze medal match to Bulgaria 0-3.
Sudesh Kumar – Munich 1972 Olympics, men’s 52kg freestyle wrestling – came agonizingly close to a medal. Sudesh finished fourth with seven penalty points.
Rajinder Singh – Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, men’s 74kg freestyle wrestling – was placed second till the penultimate round but lost the bronze medal to Saban Sejdi in the final round.
Leander Paes/Mahesh Bhupati – Athens 2004 Olympics, men’s doubles tennis – went down in the semi-finals after beating even Roger Federer and Andy Roddick pair. The Indians lost 7-6, 4-6, 16-14 to Croatia’s Mario Ancic and Ivan Ljubicic in the bronze medal match.
Kunjarani Devi – Athens 2004 Olympics, women’s 48kg weightlifting – came close lifting 82.5kg in snatch and 107.5kg in clean and jerk to a total 190kg and finished just outside the medal zone. The bronze medalist lifted 200kg.
Joydeep Karmakar – London 2012 Olympics, men’s 50m rifle prone shooting- a final score of 699.1 was not sufficient to the third-placed Rajmond Debevec, who scored 701.0.
Abhinav Bindra – Rio 2016 Olympics, men’s 10m air rifle shooting – could not repeat his gold-winning performance of Beijing 2008. The rifle marksman ended fourth where he shot 10 and rival Serhiy Kulish of Ukraine shot 10.5.
Sania Mirza/Rohan Bopanna – Rio 2016 Olympics, mixed doubles tennis – lost the semi-finals to Radek Stepanek and Lucie Hradecka 6-1, 7-5 and missed out on a bronze.
Dipa Karmakar – Rio 2016 Olympics, women’s vault gymnastics – the first female gymnast from India to make it to the final of the Olympics vault event. The gymnast landed the difficult Produnova Vault but missed the bronze by 0.150 points.
Deepak Punia – Tokyo 2020 Olympics, 86kg freestyle wrestling – let his lead slip in the final seconds to lose bronze medal match 4-2 to San Marino’s Myles Amine.
Aditi Ashok – Tokyo 2020 Olympics, women’s golf – after holding her position consistently to top three after three rounds, she slipped to fourth in the final round. Aditi missed the bronze by a stroke, the slenderest of margins.
Team India Women’s Hockey – Tokyo 2020 Olympics – A fairytale campaign saw the Indian women’s hockey team reaching the semi-finals of an Olympics for the first time but ended without a medal. The Indian eves lost the bronze medal match 4-3 to Great Britain.
Wrestling – Vinesh Phogat was disqualified hours ahead of her women’s wrestling 50kg final bout as she weighed 100g more than her weight category.
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When Sourav’s India was on its way to reaching WC final at Johannesburg against Australia in 2003, Sam Gordon, a sports psychologist from Australia was inducted in the team and it was super team efforts and skills that combined so well to take them to the finals. Sam simply uttered to the team – “ keep your process right and the results will fall in place”. Sam also introduced, for the first time in Indian sports, the ‘ Team Huddle ’ just before the game started. That the same team could not keep their cool and had gone overboard of excitement and threw away the final to the Aussie batters has been a different tale. Sam’s presence during India tour in Australia in 2003-04 had brought wonderful results. It was a major demonstration of this mental conditioning and high performance.
2023 WC final was lost in Ahmadabad against Australia only because of insufficient and weaker mental strength.
Consequently, the great show by Indian Hockey Team for last few years including the bagging the Bronze in Paris is testimony to higher and stronger mental strength. Gold and Silver may have eluded them but fighting for the Bronze and most importantly, beating Australia in an Olympic match after half a century is real achievement. If Navin Pattyanaik is rightfully credited for Hockey India’s transformation, the Olympic success has been possible for tougher and higher mental condition. Paddy Upton, the mental strength conditioner from SA and Mike Horn an adventurer from Australia, inducted with Hockey India by the coach Craig Fulton has worked wonders.
It is thus clearly evident with stronger and higher mental conditioning and never-say-die approach, most of the times, may fetch the desired results – not only in sports but in all spheres of life as well.
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