Institutions, not population or wealth alone, determine Olympic success: China rose to global sporting power through systematic talent identification, long-term investment, and specialized systems, while India — despite its size and economy — continues to underperform due to fragmented efforts and lack of continuity. 

Concentrated Excellence Principle is key: Scarce resources should be focused on select high-potential sports, athletes, and supporting infrastructure (coaching, science, medicine) over many years, rather than spreading funding thinly across many disciplines and short-term cycles. 

Long-term strategic shift needed for India: Building world-class institutions with measurable targets, sustained funding, and merit-based development can turn sporadic successes into consistent medal hauls, generating soft power, national pride, and broader benefits beyond sport.

The Olympics are one of the very few events in the world which allow an international assessment of performance between nations. It is not an all-purpose gauge of excellence, but the medal table reveals, if not all, at least some of a nation’s capabilities, the capacity to identify potential excellence, to cultivate that potential over time, and to convert potential into real-world accomplishment. 

Viewed in this way, the Olympics become a testbed of sorts, an indicator of the ability of a nation’s institutions to convert resources into achievement. One comparison in this regard is worth drawing between two very distinct nations. China and India. India and China were both massive, developing countries faced with modernisation challenges 40 years ago. But they went down different Olympic tracks since then. Since rejoining the Olympics Games in 1984, China’s systematic reform efforts have rocketed the country to the top of the world’s sporting nations in just a few decades, while India, a huge country with competitive athletes, has lagged significantly behind. At the 2024 Olympic Games, China finished second in the medal table with 40 gold medals and 91 medals overall, tying the United States in golds. Meanwhile, despite its status as fifth largest economy in the world in nominal GDP terms, India returned from Paris with one silver and five bronze medals, no golds. 

 Population clearly is not the determining factor. Nor is national ambition. The difference lies somewhere else. It lies in institutions. This is an uncomfortable conclusion because it challenges a narrative that success will naturally arrive once a nation becomes wealthier or larger. Success requires strong and deliberate institutions and wealth provides the resources necessary to pursue excellence. Yet, it is the presence of strong institutions that convert resources into achievement. The same is true for the pursuit of Olympic excellence. It should come as no surprise that most Olympic champions have grown up in sporting nations, and their athletic careers did not result from pure coincidence. They have emerged from nations that invest considerable time, money, and resources into identifying and developing talent. 

This brings me to what I will term the Concentrated Excellence Principle. The principle is quite simple. It states that given scarce resources, and an objective of achieving international sporting excellence, it would always be better to concentrate investment in a select number of sports and athletes than to dilute investments. To achieve international sporting excellence, the best path forward is to identify the........

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