More than sports to hosting the Olympics

The Olympics may well offer India a platform to highlight its economic muscle, reiterate its soft power and project its leadership ambitions.

When news of India sending its letter of intent for the 2036 Olympics to the International Olympic Committee broke, many experts and fans wondered whether the country needed to host the quadrennial event. The decision to formally express India’s interest to host the Games comes at a time when few nations are willing to spend big money to organise mega global sporting events.

FILE - A general view of the Olympic rings displayed on the Eiffel Tower is pictured during the opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. (Nir Elias/Pool Photo via AP, File) (AP)

In recent years, investment in the Olympics has mostly turned out to be a white elephant and host cities have reeled under the enormous financial burden the Games entail. Beijing, where the Games were held in 2008, was an outlier to this trend in a different way for China meant to host the Olympics to showcase its arrival on the global stage as an economic power. That worked for it.

India is hoping for more. Barring Delhi, no Indian city has the infrastructure — hotels to stadiums — to host a mega event like the Olympics. So, preparations for the Olympics may well provide the trigger to build and expand much-needed urban infrastructure. It will also give an impetus to India’s sporting ambitions, just as the 2010 Commonwealth Games did.

At the same time, the Olympics, if they do make their way to India, will be about so much more than just sport. India has set its eyes on becoming a developed nation by 2047; the Olympics, a decade from now and a decade before the centenary of Indian Independence, may well offer India a platform to highlight its economic muscle, reiterate its soft power and project its leadership ambitions.