Still winning, when the chips are down: Rudraneil Sengupta, in The Sporting Life
There is a way for athletes to take from a loss, more than they may take away from a win. It begins by being less fixated on victory.
Last Sunday, watching Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty lose the final of the India Open in New Delhi, my heart sank. It was their second straight loss in a final, their third of the season. Were they running out of steam, in an Olympic year?
It was small consolation that they lost to the reigning world champions, South Korea’s Kang Min-hyuk and Seo Seung-jae; or that their consistency had propelled them to become the first Indian doubles pair to be ranked World No.1.
Why can’t India produce serial winners, I thought to myself? That is a question pertinent not just to Sat-Chi and badminton, but to every sport. Including, of course, the men’s cricket team. This is a collection of the best players in the world, in terms of individual abilities, backed by the richest cricketing board in the world, in a country where the talent pool is about as large as that of all the other cricketing nations combined. Yet even they can’t seem to win the biggest trophies.
What separates the Indian team from the Australian team, who seem to have that “habit” of winning?
“In India, there is too much at stake when you are an athlete,” says Manisha Malhotra, a former international tennis player who now heads the sports development wing at JSW Sports. “Winning can change lives in India, raise athletes from poverty to riches, so from an early age, athletes are under great pressure to win. They are taught that winning is absolutely everything. This often means they can’t accept losing, and it saps their mental strength.”
Michael Jordan, one of the great serial winners of all time, famously said: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
The absolute truth of sport is that athletes will experience losses; wins cannot exist in a vacuum. What our young men and women could learn, perhaps, is how to take away from a loss, more than one might take away from a win.
One can win, after all, without having played at one’s best. On the flip side, one can perform at peak ability and still lose.
I believe this is why all those great Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal finals ended with the winner looking almost apologetic, and the other looking genuinely happy. They knew they each drove the other to their best.
Replace this with a desperation to win and a fear of failure, and even a small hiccup can feel like asphyxiation. Since so much of sport is about being present in the moment and reacting to it — as the cricketing adage goes, “one ball at a time” — an unhealthy focus on outcome can come at the cost of performance.
Thankfully, Sat-Chi seem healthily unfazed by losses. “I feel sometimes losing is better than winning always,” Rankireddy, 23, said, after the India Open. “We just have to keep our heads down and keep working, and the big titles will come. Losing is better sometimes… it will give us a lot of motivation.”
