Olympic schemes need pruning for efficiency

The year 2024 was not the best for Olympic sports in the country. There were controversies, numerous court cases against national sports federations for violating the 2011 Sports Code, unrelenting infighting at the Indian Olympic Association, and more heartbreaks than jubilations on the field, especially at the Paris Olympics.

However, 2025 has started with some promise. The Mission Olympic Cell (MOC), a body created to assist the athletes selected for the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS), has been reconstituted this year, as was expected. The sports ministry has included most of the major private stakeholders who have been supporting athletes with supplementary needs.

Apart from the Olympic Gold Quest, the MOC now has members from the Reliance Sports Foundation, JSW Sports, the Petroleum Sports Promotion Board and the Railway Sports Promotion Board, the largest employer of sportspersons.

This will at least ensure some kind of equal participation by other boards and private organisations, rather than having one or two select ones from such organisations.

The MOC is not the only one that got a makeover. Even TOPS has a new CEO: N S Johal. After almost a five-month lull after the Paris Olympics, the Sports Authority, the federations and the ministry are back on the saddle for massive transformation to bring in more success.

The first MOC meeting of the year was held last week. The TOPS CEO has started looking for some long-term development policies. The biggest challenge would be pruning the TOPS list. As of now, the core group has about 179 athletes and 130 are in the development group.

It’s time TOPS takes hard decisions and drops some players, including seniors who are not performing well enough to fit in the Los Angeles 2028 team. Weeding out is an important process that must be undertaken regularly.

New foreign coaches and high-performance directors need to be hired for most sports. The new CEO will need to streamline TOPS for more efficiency and fewer controversies. The road to reach double-figures in LA will be hard and bumpy.