Should India host the Olympics? An authoritative guide to why this is a bad idea

On July 1, inside a glass tower in Lausanne, India made its pitch to the world. 

A delegation from the Indian Olympic Association, led by Gujarat Sports Minister Harsh Sanghvi and IOA President PT Usha, made their way to the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee, where they presented their bid to bring the 2036 Summer Olympics to Ahmedabad. 

Among the world’s 10 largest economies, only India hasn’t hosted the Games. Time to change that.

Meanwhile, back home, India is having a summer to remember.

On July 9, the Gambhira Bridge over the Mahasagar River in Gujarat’s Vadodara collapsed during morning traffic, killing at least 21 people and plunging vehicles into the river.

On July 2, Mahal Road in Madhya Pradesh’s Gwalior, built at a cost of Rs 4 crore, caved for the seventh time in two weeks since opening to the public.

On June 18, the Harang Bridge over Assam’s Harang River collapsed under two overloaded limestone trucks during heavy rain, severing Cachar district’s link to Tripura and Mizoram. 

On June 16, a 73-year-old pedestrian bridge over the Indrayani River in Pune’s Maval tehsil buckled under roughly 100 tourists. Four died and 50 were injured. 

On June 12, two massive I-girders at Chennai Metro Rail Phase II’s Ramapuram-Manapakkam site collapsed onto the road below, killing a motorcyclist. 

And, on June 4, 11 fans of Royal Challengers Bengaluru died in a completely avoidable crowd crush at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium.

Every morning brings a freshly-brewed masterclass in infrastructure and administration in the world’s most populous nation. 

Back in Lausanne, the International Olympic Committee’s response was curt and crisp. An unnamed source informed The Indian Express that the committee asked India to first settle its own issues, like those of governance, a rampant doping problem, and India’s poor show at Olympics games. 

“It has been communicated very candidly that while India can continue preparing for its bid to host future Olympics, the country has to address these issues first. It has been made clear to us that the IOA must get its house in order before serious talks regarding hosting the Olympics take place. That’s the starting point,” the official told The Indian Express.

In short, fix your house before inviting guests.

But the Olympics pitch is the centrepiece of a buffet of bids that India is preparing for the next few years. According to journalist Mihir Vasavda, this includes “the 2030 Commonwealth Games, which is almost certain to be held in Ahmedabad, the 2027 women’s volleyball world championship and the 2028 World U20 Athletics Championships, among others. This year, Ahmedabad will host the Commonwealth Weightlifting Championship and the Asian Swimming Championship.”

So, are we ready?

A summer of reckoning

July 5, 2025 was a red-letter day in Indian athletics. The Kanteerava Stadium hosted the Neeraj Chopra Classic, India’s first World Athletics gold tier event.

I was there, nice and early, with my friend M and his son K. The east and west stands were almost packed. Little K chugged glass upon glass of watered Pepsi, while regularly scanning our sector for the chips-man. Around 7 pm, with less than 30 minutes to go before the first throw, M decided it was now or never for a washroom run. 

K nodded – three glasses of watered Pepsi were beginning to talk. Off they went. The nearest washroom for our stand – think 2,500 people – was two long, sloping floors away. Pro-tip: Lace your shoes before entering. Trust me on this. By the time M and K returned, the javelins were mounted, ready to fly.

It was a good night. Neeraj Chopra had overseen everything with the care of a new parent. Visa applications, travel, accommodations – you name it. Fifteen thousand people showed up. The press loved it. It was a thundering success, by every measure. 

Of course, the state of seating or access to water and sanitisation was probably not part of the event’s checklist. In India, the bar for infrastructure is low enough that a washroom within a relay lap’s distance counts as acceptable.

Kanteerava Stadium is also the home ground for Bengaluru Football Club. Walk down the Vital Mallya Road on a random weekend evening between September and March, and you will hear the stadium thrumming. Eight thousand voices rising and falling with the ball’s trajectory, the referee’s hands. This is what Bengaluru’s passion sounds like in the Indian Super League, India’s primary domestic football tournament. 

But six days after the NC Classic, the whole thing shut down. Its organising body, Football Sports Development Limited, couldn’t reach an agreement with the All India Football Federation over financials for the league’s rights. So naturally, they hit pause on an entire sport. At the time of writing, multiple ISL clubs have informed their players and staff that all operations are suspended indefinitely.

In India, after all, the stench in sports comes from every direction. In the same week, India secured its first ever medal – a bronze – in the mixed team badminton event at the World University Games in Germany. Soon after, one of the players, Alisha Khan, publicly alleged that only six out of 12 squad members were allowed to compete because team managers BV Rao and Rashmi Ramachandra failed to submit the full list of players during the official managers’ meeting with tournament authorities.

This is the state of administration four years from the point when India’s aspiration of hosting the Olympics hits escape velocity.

Sports journalist Sharda Ugra wrote last year that the process started as the Tokyo Olympics were winding down in 2021. By October 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was selling it to the International Olympic Committee’s annual meeting in Mumbai: “India will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to organize the Olympics in 2036. This is the age-old dream of 140 crore Indians.”

These ambitions were given the licence to cruise on an eight-lane highway. In January 2024, the Gujarat government formed a company and earmarked Rs 6,000 crore to build six sports complexes to host the 2036 Summer Olympic Games. The plan included building a 350-acre sports complex – a constellation of slick facilities wrapped around the magnetic nucleus of Indian sport that is the 1,30,000-seater Narendra Modi cricket stadium.

Cue an industrial-style cash grab. Ugra wrote: “West of Ahmedabad, there has been a large land acquisition drive in the rural area of Manipur-Godhavi. The quantity of land sought increased from 200 acres in June 2022 to between 500 and 1,000 acres quoted this March [2024].”

It’s worth remembering that in the last decade, India’s list of global sports events hosted stands thus: two men’s hockey World Cups in Odisha, two shooting World Cup Finals in New Delhi, the 2017 FIFA Men’s U-17 World Cup, and the 2023 Men’s ODI World Cup. 

There are lessons to be learned, particularly from the recent World Cup. Amongst a host of other marquee games, Ahmedabad played host for the India versus Pakistan group game on October 14, a day before the start of Navaratri. Hotels, lodges, guesthouses and PGs were all booked out weeks in advance. In desperation, some visitors booked hospital rooms – that’s right – to overlap the day of the match. 

And despite being a “global sporting event”, the 2023 World Cup was painted in a single, unwavering hue of blue. Just a vast sea blanketing every stadium, glistening under tall floodlights. You needed a magnifying glass to spot a neutral or opponent fan. 

Perhaps the “global” part was a needless detail for the organisers. 

The museum of 2010

For a deeper reality check on India’s hosting capabilities, we must rewind 15 years. 

It was 2010. The Commonwealth Games had come to Delhi. The initial budget approved for it, in 2003,  was approximately US $200 million. By 2010, the official Games spending alone, excluding non-sports infrastructure, had escalated to US $1.4 billion. After the dust settled, the total cost came out to be US $8.1 billion.

The fraudulence was artistic. Toilet paper rolls were marked up by $2 to $80, soap dispensers from $2 to $60. The timing and scoring system contract went to Swiss Timing for Rs 141 crore, casually ignoring a Spanish bid that cost less than half. 

By April 2011, the CBI had arrested Suresh Kalmadi, head of the Games’s organising committee. He was charged with criminal conspiracy, cheating and financial deceit – the building blocks of a resume for someone in Indian administration. 

But surely some of that money gave the Games some sparkle? Well…

On September 21, 2010, a newly-built, arch-supported pedestrian bridge outside Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium collapsed during finishing work, injuring 23 labourers. The PWD contractor’s loose clamps had led to progressive cable failure. 

Two days later, three panels of a false ceiling in the weightlifting area fell. A temporary canopy inside the stadium collapsed, lightly injuring two police officers. Indian boxer Akhil Kumar’s bed in the Games Village snapped under his weight when he sat on it. Plywood was missing from the frame. At Delhi University Stadium, a supporting chain of the electronic scoreboard snapped, sending the board crashing to the ground.

The Games Village itself became a monument to Indian hospitality. Rooms were described as “filthy and inhabitable” with paan stains on walls and floors, liquor bottles, and dog poop found on beds. Delegations from New Zealand, Canada, Scotland and Northern Ireland formally complained of “unliveable” quarters less than two weeks before the opening ceremony. Several of these towers had their drainage clogged from used condoms. 

Lalit Bhanot, secretary-general of the organising committee, responded to criticisms of cleanliness with this gem: “Everyone has a different standard of cleanliness. The rooms of the Games Village are clean according to you and me, but they have some other standard of cleanliness.”

Bhanot would be one of 10 officials from the organising committee arrested in 2011 on charges of corruption. A year later, he and another fellow arrestee, Ajay Singh Chautala, were both elected unopposed into the Indian Olympic Association as secretary-general and president. 

The gold rush

After the Games debacle, the International Olympic Committee suspended India, an exile that lasted 14 months. On our return, we did what we do best – throw more money at the problem.

In 2014-15, the sports ministry’s budget hit a record high of Rs 1,769 crore. There was a flurry of new names and acronyms: Khelo India, Youth Games, Target Olympics Podium Scheme, all backed by the central government and promising investment and transformation. 

“The Khelo events have benefitted a lot of athletes because there are more competitions for them to take part in as compared to earlier,” Sharda Ugra tells me. “But they are essentially just events. The government is just running events which the federations need to be doing, but how is hosting more and more events going to improve and create a new, modern, 21st-century sporting ecosystem?”

The government was following a pattern. Around this time, something had shifted in Indian sport. The Indian Premier League had transformed cricket from sports to spectacle. It attracted more attention than traditional international cricket, which translated to higher television and advertising revenue. Et, voila!

Everyone wanted their own IPL. Sports lawyer Nandan Kamath catalogued the gold rush in his book Boundary Lab:

“Badminton, tennis, cue sports, wrestling, hockey, football, basketball, volleyball, arm wrestling, kho kho – name the sport, and a franchise-based league has either been attempted or announced. With the Pro Kabaddi League and the Indian Super League for football being prominent exceptions, most other leagues have not survived beyond a season or two, with some like hockey having had multiple iterations and reincarnations, all with limited success.”

Meanwhile, a familiar lament persisted every time the Olympics came around: For a country of a billion, India can’t win enough medals. This isn’t untrue – India could rank anywhere in the official medals table but we’ll always comfortably, consistently rank last when the table is factored for GDP.

So, we chase medals through the most brute-force method possible. Because how else do we measure development in this country? We worship scale: the world's tallest statue, the largest stadium, the longest bridge. The number of people we can gather to wear uniforms and wave at Donald Trump. If it’s big, it must be good. 

So, five more medals = vikaas.

In the process, we conceal two key truths about medals. One, in a healthy sporting environment, an Olympic medal should be the final milestone of a long process. And two, barring Neeraj Chopra’s gold and silver, all India’s recent medals are in sports in which we’re traditionally strong, like badminton, wrestling or shooting. These are ecosystems that work despite the system, not because of it.

For the rest of the field – for the young, the hopeful, the triers, and those who make an ecosystem thrive – it’s more pages of the same depressing story.

Let’s look at the apex of the pyramid. In India, it’s the Sports Authority of India, headquartered at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi. The stadium was renovated for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 at a cost of about Rs 900 crore, and then again in 2020 for an eye-watering Rs 7,800 crore. 

You’d think that’s enough money to guarantee basic facilities. And you’d be wrong.

In 2016, a parliamentary panel termed the stadium’s athletic track as a “death trap for athletes”. A news report found damaged walls, broken beds, nails sticking out of cupboards, and washrooms without water. In 2024, the stadium played host to Punjabi singer Diljit Dosanjh’s Dilluminati Tour. Result: stadium littered with garbage and debris, running tracks strewn with spoiled food, spilled drinks, and alcohol bottles.

This year, the stadium will play host to the World Para Athletic Championships. With just months to go, athletes have been complaining about lack of water and sanitation at the venue. “We have to struggle to get water for drinking, particularly in summers,” one said. A coach noted the renovated track surface is “uneven and technically not suitable for national competition.” A parent said the women's washrooms aren't maintained.

The problem is structural – both literally and metaphorically. Remember the Indian Olympic Association getting suspended by the international body after the 2010 Commonwealth Games? Well, suspension is a bit of a theme in our amusement park.

In the same year, 2012, the Indian Amateur Boxing Federation got suspended for manipulation of elections. A month later, the Boxing Federation of India got suspended for failure to amend its constitution and hold elections the correct way. In 2022, FIFA suspended the All India Football Federation due to undue influence from “third parties”, which constitutes a serious violation of the FIFA Statutes. 

Wait, we aren’t done. 

In August 2023, the Wrestling Federation of India was suspended by the Union World Wrestling. A few months later, the WFI was suspended again, this time by the government of India. 

Through it all, the WFI operated under Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, a BJP member eventually charged with sexual harassment of women wrestlers. After a year of protests that made international headlines, after court cases and public outcry, the authorities finally acted. They removed Brij Bhushan and, in an anti-climax, handed the federation to his close aide, Sanjay Singh. The office remains in the same Hari Nagar building. Only the nameplate changed.

The cost of the Olympics

Hosting the Olympics is a tough gig. For starters, it will place an immense burden on an unequal society and an economy that has volume but isn’t flourishing.

Kamath wrote, “Except for Los Angeles 1984 and Barcelona 1992, virtually every Olympic Games (and FIFA World Cup) host over the last many decades has been left with a heavy debt burden. The citizens of Montreal continued to pay a special tax for four decades after hosting the 1976 Games to pay off the city’s debt.”

Last year, Paris showed us how to host a good Games. It was slick, it was grand, and it was quintessentially Paris. They used and reused what the city already had, and executed a fantastic Olympics at minimal outlay of public funds - $10 billion, a mere 25 percent above initial estimates.

Like Andy Bull writes here, “Paris rose to the moment, like Céline Dion striding out on to the esplanade of the Eiffel Tower in her shimmering Christian Dior gown to sing L’Hymne à l’amour.”

Los Angeles promises to have a no-car Olympics in 2028, depending completely on public transit systems.

Executing something of this scale needs vision, and not the kind that makes for clever acronyms on government schemes. You need vision beyond how your latest speech looks like on Twitter. The government wants to flex the allocation of Rs 3,794 crore to the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports for FY 2025-26, but smartly avoids the question when pointed out that it is less than the money spent on the renovation of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in 2020.

Ugra explains the disconnect well in this piece:

“Recently, IOC member Nita Ambani, speaking at the Harvard India Summit in Boston, talked about how 9 out of 10 of the largest economies of the world had hosted the Olympics, but not India. With respect, it must be mentioned that none of these nine largest Olympics-hosting economies of the world had as badly-governed, fractured and disputed sporting ecosystems like India. While China’s state-driven sports model is an authoritarian but effective one in terms of Olympic medal success, the other top 10 economies have organic, thriving sporting structures.”

When the foundation isn’t ready, the renovation can look ghastly. In an article from June 2013 – the summer before the 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup, and three summers before the Rio Summer Olympics – sports journalist Wright Thompson spoke of the upheaval in Brazil:

“Hospitals and schools are falling down while stadiums are rising up. The government in Rio tried to demolish one of the best elementary schools in the country to make room for a parking lot near the Maracanã Stadium, where the World Cup final will be played.”

This story reminds me of something more recent, the G20 summit held in Delhi in September 2023. I was visiting my family in Noida the same week, so had to criss-cross through the city of Delhi into Uttar Pradesh and back for the airport. The city looked familiar, just decked in massive banners with massive pictures of the prime minister, proclaiming India’s success story, and welcoming global leaders. 

And lots of sheets. Rows and rows of green sheets.

The application of this fashion accessory, from the Delhi 2023 Fall Collection, was painfully transparent. See, Delhi is not just the city of bureaucrats, but also of those who can’t afford the schooling to know how to spell bureaucrat. So, the government dipped into their instincts and came up with a solution: evictions, demolition, and covering. If you can’t see the poor, does poverty really exist? 

It’s the same party that has placed itself in charge of bringing the biggest singular global event to India. How is it going, you ask? The Gujarat government has already started sending out evacuation notices.

Should India even entertain thoughts of hosting the Olympics in the near future? Nandan Kamath sums it up: 

“India’s national sporting priorities do not necessarily have to remain in the realms of excellence, competition and performance alone…That there are public funds involved must be at the front and centre of the evaluation. Rather than benefit a small minority, their use must benefit society at large, or at least a large portion of it…Once we set up the social and institutional infrastructure that can deliver the benefits of sport and physical activity to all Indians, we may be able to meaningfully host the Olympic Games.”

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