Abhinav Bindra on why winning isn't everything

How do we achieve that? In multiple ways. First, sport can play an important role in the health of this nation. We are a young society, but we are also an ageing society, and the role of sport to make India healthier is immense. We need more people and policies, where we encourage sport and physical activity, which is at an alarmingly low level in a young population. Which also means that it will have severe consequences in the increase in non-communicable diseases (NCDs), for example, a key cause of mortality, and eventually have a bearing on the economy and the productivity of our people. According to a 2024 report by consulting firm Dalberg, if every adult in India were to shun a sedentary lifestyle by 2047, the annual GDP would stand to gain $50 billion. The report adds that roughly $17 billion yearly will come from health outcomes as less will be spent on NCDs, while an ensuing spike in workforce productivity should fetch a further $28 billion.

But it’s not just physical health, sport also plays a key role in mental health. Research shows that when people play, it has a direct impact on their mental well-being, reducing anxiety and depression. I would like to see how we can integrate sport better in health-related policies, which will, bit by bit, help in taking it mainstream. 

Next comes education. I don’t have the exact number, but I can safely assume that of the 1.4 billion population, the number of those actively playing something is quite low. And one of the reasons is the lack of playing infrastructure at the grassroots, in schools and colleges—it is essential to allow kids access to playgrounds from an early age. 

Why is this important, especially at a time emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are disrupting the sector? The answer might be intangible, but extremely crucial. Because AI will never be able to instil values in kids or teach them experiential life lessons. There is no better teacher than the playing field—when you play a sport, you learn to win but you also learn how to lose. You learn teamwork, honesty, integrity, goal-setting, fair play what have you. Values that we imbibe through sport at a young age stick with us for the rest of our lives.

Also watch: Make happiness your gold medal: Abhinav Bindra

Agreed, over 95 percent of these kids will probably not become athletes, but sport would have impacted their character and their development as responsible citizens and better human beings. The exercise to start sport in schools shouldn’t be seen as one to create Olympic champions—you start sports in schools to make young India happier and healthier, and the result of that will be the rise in the percentage of youth taking part in elite sports.  

No less important is sport’s role in promoting gender equality. When girls play sports, it has a direct influence on their confidence, says research. I’ll give an example from my experience of running my foundation. 

The Abhinav Bindra Foundation partners with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to introduce the Olympic Values Education Programme—free, accessible teaching resources to complement school curricula using Olympic sports and values—to 60,000 schools across three states. When we started our programme in 2022, we noticed that girls hardly ventured out to play during PE (physical education) classes. So, we changed all our rules and we made our activities ‘mixed team’ in nature, forcing the girls and boys to play together. Of course, that made the boys grumpy for the first couple of weeks, but they gradually realised that some of the girls were really good, and it gave them a newfound respect for girls. This brought about a behavioural change that came through the playing field, where everyone starts as equal.  

But what was even more impressive was that, in the first year of the programme, when we launched a mixed-gender, inter-school football tournament, the team captains of 64 out of 100 participating schools were girls—a majority of them were nominated by the boys.

Add to that, the role of PE teachers. Unfortunately, in the Indian hierarchy, the PE teacher lies at the lowest ebb, whereas if you go to the US, the powerhouse of Olympic sports, s/he is the most popular person in the school. If we can encourage the PE teachers and make them more respected, that has an impact not just on performance but on all the other elements that I talk about—the first experience a kid has with sport is usually at the school level, and if that is anything less than positive, we lose people who could have embraced sport. 

Sports infrastructure also brings me to the subject of urban development. We are at a phase where large spends are being allocated to such development—the total outlay for urban development in the current year’s budget stands at ₹96,777 crore, and a rash of infrastructural projects are being launched, smart cities etc are being worked upon. But part of that should be community-level infrastructure projects to give people access to sport. These don’t need to be shiny Olympic stadiums but just basic facilities for the community to come together and play as a social activity, fostering the values that I mentioned earlier. 

Bottomline is, be it health, education, urban development, women’s empowerment or whatever aspect of modern society you talk about, sport should be advanced through all levels of policy, instead of just being governed standalone by the ministry of sport, whose real focus is elite sport. Of course, it has started structured programmes like Khelo India, Fit India, and those are all welcome initiatives, but what I would like to see is for sports to start getting mainstreamed in facets of policies framed for different purposes. The playing population won’t rise through a top-down approach, but only when sport is fashioned as a tool to achieve the critical aspects of nation-building.

Let me go back to the US to show how embedding sport with education is critical. Look at how many of their athletes emerge out of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), their collegiate system that governs over 500,000 college athletes. When sports start to become stronger at all levels, many things start to fall in place—the quality of coaches at the grassroot level, access to sport, and only then, of course, you have more people dedicating 15 years of their lives to elite sports.

If you focus on channelling sport through the portals of education, it overrides the inherent education-versus-sports contradiction that exists in India. The very nature of sport is that most people taking it up will fail. So, if there are more failures than successes, how do you prepare those who have spent 15 years of their life giving it their all for the life after? By giving them basic education alongside, enabling a rounded development and a better ability to transition out of sport. It’s just not feasible to give everybody a free job and a pension, instead open up dual career pathways for them. If they are forced to put all their eggs in one basket, the pressure to perform multiplies so much more. 

I’m very passionate about the work that I do in schools, with children to make them play, to use sport to imbibe values. It gives me a tremendous purpose to see first-hand the transformational role that sport can play in changing lives. If top athletes in the country can take up a cause that resonates with them and put their weight behind it, I feel it will give them a meaning to their lives that will be greater than any gold medal they would have won on the field of play. 

As told to Kathakali Chanda