The home team had previously routed India in the qualifiers but this was going to be a different outing. By the time the final whistle blew, Hitler, who had come with great hope to watch a repeat performance by his team, had walked out in disgust.

India`s legendary hockey wizard Dhyan Chand had pulled off another sensational win. In doing so he mocked a nefarious ideology too. Earlier Jesse Owens, America`s sensational black athlete, had defied Hitler`s racial theory by winning the gold.

By 1976, when the Games were held in Montreal, the Cold War, which had supplanted the ideological divide, was at a new peak. My 10-year old niece was in school in the United States. She watched the Montreal Olympics live on TV. We had no such technology in India, or it may have been the early phase of Doordarshan when there were more TV antennas on Delhi`s roofs than sets thanks to the snob value that came with new gadgetry. I asked Saba the niece what she thought of Nadia Comaneci, Romania`s magical athlete with uneven bars and other assorted calisthenics.

“Uncle, you know that she is a communist, don`t you?” came the reply from the 10-year old. So what, I said. Didn`t Nadia have a beautiful smile and wasn`t she a sensational athlete at 14? “Well. You know that communists are trained how to smile,” said Saba looking incorrigibly confident. It turned out that she had been reading George Orwell`s Animal Farm in school, and had been nicely indoctrinated. When the West boycotted the next Olympics because they were held in Moscow, and Moscow having been put in the doghouse for raiding Afghanistan, the incipient ideological rumblings roared full throttle.

And now there is talk of boycotting the Winter Olympics that are due years later in Russia, because Russia has invaded Georgia. There was similar talk of boycotting the Beijing Olympics over the Tibetan issue.

India may not have participated directly in the ideological-political disputes surrounding the staging of the Olympics — its attention being mostly riveted to Sachin Tendulkar and Sania Mirza, but definitely away from the little noticed badminton sensation Saina Nehwal — but it has paid dearly for pursuing a far-fetched dream of miraculous prosperity without ever trying to involve its people in the endeavour. Neo-liberals rarely do.

For a country that pawned away a large slice of its gold reserves in 1990, Abhinav Bindra`s rare medal at the Beijing Olympics, the first individual gold ever for India, is replete with symbolism and irony. That Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was among the first to greet Bindra only added a bittersweet contrariness to the victory. In a manner of speaking, the prime minister was free India`s original pawnbroker. He was a key adviser to the finance minister when the Chandrashekhar government pledged a slice of India`s gold reserves to the Bank of England ostensibly to keep the economy from faltering. And here was Bindra bringing a bit of it back.

Abhinav Bindra was not quite the dark horse he is made out to be even if many of us had not heard of him thanks to the media`s obsession with cricket. Few know that he overcame a career-threatening back injury that saw him miss a number of tournaments including the last Asian Games. This happened at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in 2006 and it got aggravated after he battled pain to win the world title in Zagreb later in the year. Did we notice?

And who brought him back from the brink? It was not any Indian support system but a group of German doctors who helped him stage the comeback. “One hundred per cent credit to the German doctors. The entire rehabilitation happened in Germany and it took him nearly one year to come back,” confessed the father of the world`s new shooting icon.

India had last won a gold medal in hockey in Moscow, that too when Pakistan and West European rivals had boycotted the Olympics. This year its team did not even qualify to go to Beijing, a major letdown for a nation that once looked up to its hockey heroes to keep it in the hunt for gold and glory. In fact from 1928 to 1956, the Indian hockey juggernaut won six straight Olympic gold medals while winning 24 consecutive matches. The Indian stranglehold over the Olympic hockey gold came to an end when Pakistan defeated India in the final of the 1960 Rome Olympics.

The fact that the entire official system has had hardly any role in Bindra`s victory is a point to ponder. “He won because he was lucky to have a rich and generous father,” wrote the Times of India. “In other words, he had access to a private support structure like other successful Indian sportsmen, who have triumphed — not because of the system but despite it.”

Ask the officials at Delhi`s Tughlaqabad Shooting Centre, the country`s showpiece shooting facility. It was expected to produce champions but never did. The officials know that they hadn`t contributed to Bindra`s success, not even a bit. Out of 19 winners of India`s highest sports awards each one of them has come up through his or her own initiative often defying the system. Whether it was Vishwanathan Anand in chess or Geet Sethi in billiards or Mahendra Singh Dhoni in cricket or Leander Paes in tennis — they all arrived by ignoring the system. Or else the system would have ignored them.

Part of the apathy has to do with the dismantling of the welfare state by Mr Manmohan Singh`s free-market reforms. But much of the explanation lies also with a national attitude as it were. Take the decorated soldiers whose services are tethered to the lore of patriotic fervour. The picture of Company Quarter Master Havildar Abdul Hameed with kohl in his eyes comes to mind. He is remembered in common lore as the man who destroyed Pakistani tanks with hand grenades. Hameed`s widow was living in penury when she was last heard of.

Or take India`s first individual medal winner — wrestler Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav — who won the bronze in the Helsinki Games in 1952. “His family and villagers remember how the national hero struggled to survive, despite his feat, and died a tragic death in 1984, without any national or state recognition.”

We can say this of India`s leaders, including the current ones, that they have not shown a desire to play politics with Olympics, quite possibly because they were too busy leading the country to a great future with nuclear energy and so on. In the meantime, this was seen as an opportunity by a few individuals with pluck and grit to do the best they could for the country. The ovation and not the nation inspires them.

The writer is Dawn`s correspondent in Delhi. jawednaqvi@gmail.com