Another piece where people outside the country wonder and are baffled and befuddled by the apparent lack of logic – there is an expectation that statistics should work here – that numbers must produce answers.

Just like the author in this article does, there are many postmortem analyses one expects. In fact there is a four-year rhythm to this spectacle, and generally there are patterns and meta-patterns of theories.

Most often the causality ends with – Poverty, Lack of Infrastructure, A culture of emphasis on Academics, access to quality things, and so on.

This article is not different – there is no new understanding.

What is interesting is the continued repetition of ‘solution’ attempts in response – imitate what others have done, throw technology, throw money, create new motivators – rename awards to invoke past glories, and so on. Even glorifying the Supreme Leader does not seem to make anything ‘mumkin’.

That fact that it has not worked for decades, and the numbers speak for themselves, does not seem to get people to wonder – what if there is something more fundamentally wrong in our understanding of the whole phenomenon – and I mean the whole.

That brings me to – what if our understanding of who we are and what we dream of and intend to become itself needs revisiting? I do not know what that is, but what is obvious, is that whatever has been tried is not working.

Rather than create this perpetual narrative of ‘failure’ in someone’s or the world’s eyes – why not change the narrative itself?

What is the role of sport in society? How does it contribute to our well-being – what is appropriate for where we are in terms of stages of development? What is appropriate to who we are as a culture/people?

Not the tchotchkes of conventional design, but a radically different strategic design?

Image credit – Sportkeeda.com