It’s 6 medals for 18 million Indians, not 1.2 billion

As some of us celebrate India’s best ever performance at the Olympic Games, winning six medals, there are others who, cynically, do the math: 6 medals for 1.2 billion people.

The math is reminiscent of the first lot of MNC brands that entered India at the turn of the century — they saw opportunity when they salivated over a market of one billion people. It took them a few years to realise that, while the population, indeed, was a billion, the relevant population was in tens of millions. Then came the expensive rejig of the math, their business plans and their dreams.

Many are doing the same with the 6 medals, 1.2 billion population equation.

Let’s look at the 1.2 billion. How many have heard of the Olympic Games? According to the 2011 census , India had a population of 1,210,193,422 people, of which 742,490,639 live in rural India.

That leaves us with an urban population of 286,119,689. Largely, that’s the pool from which likely Olympic winners can be drawn. At this stage, the math improves by a factor of 4; it’s now 6 medals: 286 million people.

Then we come to the age demographics. The 0-14 age group accounts for 31.1 percent of the population and the 65+ age group accounts for 5.3 percent of the population. The rest are in the 15-64 age group.

If one makes a presumption, for the sake of the exercise, that the age demographics are constant across rural and urban India, the 0-14 and 65+ age groups account for about 103 million people (36.3 percent) in urban India.

Leave these 103 million out of the math please. It’s not unreasonable; the youngest winner at the London 2012 Games was 15 and the oldest 56 . The math gets better still; it’s now 6 medals for 183 million people.

Having got the people out of the way, let’s take a look at how many of the 26 sports disciplines Indians have heard of and are exposed to.

We have archery, badminton, basketball, beach volleyball, boxing, canoe/kayak, cycling, diving, equestrian, fencing, field hockey, gymnastics, handball, judo, modern pentathlon, rowing, sailing, shooting, soccer/football, swimming, synchronised swimming, table tennis, taekwondo, tennis, track and field, triathlon (swimming, biking, running), volleyball, water polo, weightlifting and wrestling.

Of these, beach volleyball, canoe/kayak, fencing, handball, sailing and synchronised swimming are sports that even urban India is unexposed to. The chances of any Indian winning any medal in these sports is, therefore, zero.

In the rest of the sports, the shortage of infrastructure (for example, how many quality gymnasia are there in the country? How many hockey Astroturf grounds do we have), makes access available to a small percentage of urban Indians – perhaps 10 percent?

Then the math changes more. It’s now 6 medals from 18.3 million people. And these six medals have come from the sports that we have some exposure to.

Admittedly, this math will hold true for very single country participating at the Games.

That’s the point — the medals:population ratio is an exercise in futility. Medals come from a very small subset of the population in any country — and infrastructure plays a large role in success in sport.

If you take these into account, the six medals begin to look very, very good.