Subject: Regarding the dismal performance in Olympics
Respected PM,
I think that we need to approach Olympics as a war and prepare our athletes as soldiers. All this talk of lack of talent or lack of infrastructure is an excuse. To compete and excel at a particular level, one has to train at minimum at that level or at a higher level. As simple as that. So, the question is: are our sports-warriors training at the level demanded by Olympics? The answer is 'no'. They may be training their skills to match the Olympic level, but their physical, mental and psychological make-ups are definitely no match to the make-ups of the elite sports machines. We crumble under pressure, we feel overwhelmed, we feel intimidated, we feel inferior, and so on.
Now let me tell you how the military deals with this problem. The fundamental focus of a military training is not on teaching weapons, but on breaking down a personality and remolding it into an elite fighting machine. Once the physical, mental and psychological barriers of a candidate are broken, they can be stretched to any desired level, they become elastic. This is the hardest and the most rewarding phase of the training. Many candidates break down in the process. But the ones who make it through are transformed into elite weapons. You can deploy them in any situation, naked and without guns, and they'll still do what is required of them. They have learnt to exploit any situation to their advantage. They wont cry and they wont whine.
Once a soldier is transformed into an elite killing machine, now all they need to do is to practice various scenarios in a simulated terrain that matches the battlefield. The focus of this phase is to master a skill. Because the operating level of a solider is now elevated, the amount of effort and discipline required in this phase won't seem Herculean. An elite candidate can train at these levels relatively easily.
Rather than taking the old and tired approach of first learning a skill and then gradually pushing it to a higher level, the approach should be to first remold the physio-psychological make-up of a candidate to an elite make-up and then simply throwing thousand of hours of elite-level training. The first approach takes time, and because we don't have a sporting culture like cricket where candidates learn to compete from their childhood, so by the time an athlete reaches an elite level of performance, he/she is past their biological prime. The second approach is how the military does it - pick them at 16-18, then few years of make-up change, and then 3 years of elite practice and we'll have our sports-warriors ready to bring golds by 21-23 yrs of age. And we'll have at least 2-3 Olympics to reap dividends.
So, how do we go about this change? I think that we can setup a specialized military branch whose job is to prepare our sports-warriors. The reasons - a) military has the know-how and the facilities required for such training - especially the remolding part. b) military can easily recruit candidates – all we need to do is to benchmark the physical make-up of an elite Olympian in different sports and select candidates fitting the make-up. c) most of our athletes are from an underprivileged background and their biggest need is security. By recruiting them as soldiers and carving out a specialized path for them to a glorious career based on their sports excellence, we can secure their future as well as motivate generation after generation from similar background to sustain our Olympic system - this way we can institutionalize our gold medals like China does.
Respected sir, I've spent an entire night thinking and composing my arguments and I sincerely believe that my suggestion has merit. It shames me to see that a billion of us can't win even a single gold in Olympics. It's due time that we start winning some and it's not really that hard if you ask me, only we need to set our sight firm and establish a system that is self-sustainable.
