What Went Wrong With Indian Hockey?

As the Indian hockey team failed to make its presence felt at the olympics yet again, ridhima malhotra finds out what plagues our national sport.

- Rishima Malhotra

Field hockey, our national sport, is also the sport for which we have won maxi-mum Olympic golds — a total of eight, six of them consecutively from 1928 to 1956. The men’s team also won us one silver and two bronze medals. We only have one other Olympic gold in any other sport, won by Abhinav Bindra for shooting, at Beijing in 2008.

After we won the gold at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the performance of the men’s hockey team started deteriorating and we have failed to win a single medal for it since then. The team’s worst performance was when it failed to qualify for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, followed by finishing 12th at the 2012 London Olympics.

At Rio, the Indian men’s hockey team finished 8th while the women’s team finished 13th, even as their world rankings are number 6 and 12 respectively. What is the reason for the downfall of our national sport, at least of the men’s team that used to rule the roost in the world? Today, while our hockey players work hard to give their best performances, they lack consistency. Their performance tends to be good in one tournament, disappointing in the next.

According to former Indian men’s team captain Dhanraj Pillay, the downfall in the team’s performance has been due to vast changes in international hockey brought about too quickly. “Since the time we won eight Olympic golds, the world of hockey has changed a lot,” he tells Tehelka. “Earlier, we used to rule. Now it’s European players who dominate. Indian players haven’t been able to adjust to the changes (in hockey) brought about internationally. For instance, when astroturf was introduced, there were too few in our country. As the Europeans honed their skills on astroturf, Indian players took a lot of time to adjust to it,” he says.