The boom and bust of sporting culture in A.P.

It was September 19, 2000, viewers’ eyes glued to the television screens watched in disbelief as a 25-year-old from a small village in Andhra Pradesh’s Srikakulam district etched her name in the history books by dishing out a medal-winning performance and made it to the Olympic podium in Sydney. Karnam Malleswari lifted 240 kg in the women’s 69 kg Weightlifting category at the 2000 Sydney Olympics to bag a bronze medal, becoming the first Indian woman to clinch an Olympic medal. Yet, 25 years later, Malleswari’s name still stands alone on Andhra Pradesh’s Olympic honour roll – a stark reminder of a regional sporting culture that once ran deep and has since run dry.

Ironically, a State that had repeatedly built a system that produced medals, has over the years let it fall apart.

Badminton tells a similar story. Swarna Bharati Indoor Stadium, built in 1998, hosted mini-Nationals and a Mayor’s Cup where Saina Nehwal, Parupalli Kashyap, Sai Praneeth, Sikki Reddy and Guru Sai Dutt all played, recalls M.V. Murali Krishna, India’s Para-badminton team coach, who trained there for years. Satwiksairaj Rankireddy trained under him for two months before moving to the Gopichand Academy, and Kidambi Srikanth, Murali Krishna says, started in the city.

“From the nineties to 2010, we dominated like anything,” he says. “In a quarterfinal of eight, five used to be from Andhra Pradesh, and half the Indian team’s strength belonged here.” Today, he says, “I hardly find an Andhra Pradesh boy or girl in the Indian team. And if I do, they are not training in the State.”

Hockey has its own share of glimmer in Visakhapatnam. Hockey ran in the blood of Visakhapatnam’s Anglo-Indian community, as its members made up nine of the playing XI of India’s hockey squad during the Olympic Games through the 1930s and 1940s, recalls June Gallyot, the District Sports Development Officer (DSDO) for Visakhapatnam. The game was organised around works teams from the Port Trust, the Railways, the Navy and the Shipyard, competing at the multi-sport Gymkhana ground.

“From 1980 to about 2000, Vizag district was on top,” says Noel Treasure, president of the Friends Hockey Association. “In the 1980s and 1990s, six players from the city used to play in an 11-member Andhra hockey team. That was the peak. In only these last 10 years, we have collapsed.”

Both accounts converge on 2014. Chandrababu Naidu, as Chief Minister, built world-class sporting infrastructure in Hyderabad and when the State split, that infrastructure went to Telangana. “In the division, we lost everything,” Murali Krishna says.

A generation of infrastructure lag

Infrastructure has been a primary pain point in several sports in the State. Gallyot, who played for India’s junior and senior hockey squads and was first reserve for the Beijing Asian Games before training as a coach, lists the gap plainly. “There is a drastic need for a synthetic athletics track, and for an AstroTurf for hockey,” she said.

“No national-level hockey is played on gravel any more, even at the sub-junior level. The ball moves far faster on turf; on gravel, you tire yourself instead of tiring the ball,” she explained. Andhra Pradesh has three turfs at Kakinada, Kadapa, and Pulivendula. She, says, Kakinada has only one turf, where the international norm calls for a main turf and a warm-up turf. Elsewhere, hockey and football are still played on gravel.

“We had the talent, we had everything, but we never upgraded our infrastructure. We are falling back on this today,” Gallyot says.

Coaching capacity is thinner still. Visakhapatnam district has nine coaches against 15 or 16 in smaller districts, she says.

The profession itself has been diluted, she believes. “Every coach needs a minimum of five years to know the physical, mental and psychological attributes of training. Here, you do a six-week certificate course, and you’re a certified coach. You can’t do that for medicine.”

Peter Das, a national hockey player and coach, put a number on the shortage of grounds behind it. “A small place like Amsterdam has about 120 grounds. In Andhra Pradesh, we say we do not have even one.”

Facilities are not the only structure missing. “For the last 10 years, the official hockey bodies have not been working with the clubs,” says Noel Treasure. “For the past 15 years, we have not had even a league. Once you begin a league, automatically the clubs get involved.”

Where money has been spent, the coaches say it has been spent badly. Swarna Bharati was rebuilt at a cost of around ₹70 crore, but despite being an international player and an Indian team coach, Murali Krishna claims he was never consulted on the design. The result: six wooden courts, no more than before, with no warm-up arena, no practice court and washrooms below standard.

“Just to make it a beautiful vision from the outside. By investing another ₹20 crore or ₹30 crore, we would have got a wonderful international-standard stadium,” he said, adding that a separate multipurpose venue fares no better for badminton, since a fixed basketball hoop obstructs the shuttle’s flight, and only four courts were built, too few even for district-level play.

The renovated Swarna Bharati is “not wheelchair-accessible”, Murali Krishna points out, after coaching India’s Para-badminton team for four years to roughly 25 international events, including the Asian Games and Para Asian Games.

He sees a contradiction with official policy. “Our Prime Minister is promoting sport for the disabled, and facilities-wise from the government side, it is said to be equal,” Murali Krushna says. “So where is that equal right to enter the stadium?” The result, he says, is that Andhra Pradesh is nearly invisible at the level he competes at: “I hardly find a player from Andhra Pradesh” at international Para-badminton events.

Meanwhile, I. Venkateswara Rao, the Dronacharya award-winning boxing coach and former Indian team coach, locates the failure one level above facilities, in the absence of any State system at all.

“Our sports system itself is not clear,” he says. “If you simply conduct group training as routine training, the results will also be routine. We should identify athletes specifically and provide individual care.”

Jyothi Yarraji, Visakhapatnam’s own Olympian and the first Indian woman to compete in the 100 m hurdles at the Olympics, is the clearest evidence of what the system can do when it exists, and how easily Andhra Pradesh has let it lapse.

By Gallyot’s account, Yarraji first showed promise on a hockey ground in the city’s port area, before all-India athletics meet in 2015 redirected her. The turning point came only when she was admitted to a centre of excellence the Sports Authority of Andhra Pradesh (SAAP) had set up at Acharya Nagarjuna University in Guntur, staffed with foreign coaches. “Even before Jyothi [Yarraji] could win a medal, they saw her level of practice, which event she is suitable for and predicted she would be a future medallist,” Gallyot says.

That centre no longer exists. “It’s not there now,” Gallyot ruefully says when asked its current status. The system that produced the State’s most recent Olympian has since been discontinued, and Andhra Pradesh has yet to build another one like it.

What’s in the store

However, there is something to cheer for as there are signs of movement on several fronts. Komadi, a 27-acre integrated complex reclaimed after years of encroachment, already runs academies in water sports, cycling, boxing and athletics, with hockey recently added; Gallyot expects football also to become a part of it once its eight-lane track is complete. Two Khelo India proposals, a ₹14-crore multi-purpose hall for Arilova and an 11-acre project for Gajuwaka, are yet to get the Centre’s nod. 

Gallyot’s coaching, across postings in Visakhapatnam and Srikakulam, produced other India-level players besides Yarraji, including Ramya, a goalkeeper who represented India at the Junior World Cup and now plays for Bank of Baroda, and Bhavani, from Yellamanchili, who represents North Eastern Railway. The Visakhapatnam Collector, M. Abhishikth Kishore, has made infrastructure a standing item at review meetings, Gallyot says, and states that Visakhapatnam could be the hub of sport in the State in the future.

“He [Abhishikth Kishore] says that we have to work towards the development of infrastructure as per the international level, and that all the available infrastructure should be on par with the notified Olympic disciplines,” she said.

The most visible initiative is P.V. Sindhu’s multi-sport academy, at Arilova, whose expanded, roughly two-lakh-square-foot vision broke ground on August 5. Its design deliberately echoes what coaches like Gallyot say the State has never built: children will try up to nine sporting disciplines before specialising around the age of 10, guided by coaches, sports scientists and, eventually, an on-campus school.

“India does not lack talent or ambition,” Sindhu said at the recent ground-breaking ceremony. “What children sometimes lack is the right environment, a place that says you belong here. I want every child who enters this campus to feel that world-class opportunity has come home, and that they do not have to leave their roots behind to reach the world.” It is targeted for completion in May 2028.

Not everyone believes one institution changes the picture, however well-funded. “It is a personal academy. It is not a public academy,” Murali Krishna says of Sindhu’s centre. “I invested money, my friends invested money, we established Laqshya Badminton Academy. It is a private one.” What the city still needs, he argues, are grounds any child can walk into.

“There should be arenas accessible to the common people. Within that number, we will get talented people, and those will be picked up by the professional centres. That is the ecosystem.” Without it, he said, Andhra Pradesh is “looking from top to bottom”, honouring medal winners with crores in prize money while offering an ordinary child nowhere to start. “It is easy to say, work like Sindhu. But where will this small kid go to work?” he asks.

What it will take

The prescriptions on offer are strikingly consistent. Venkateswara Rao wants a State centre of excellence with individual attention for a small number of athletes, on the Odisha model. Murali Krishna wants the opposite emphasis at the base: minimum facilities spread across a thousand schools rather than one Model campus, so that talent is not filtered by who happens to live nearby.

S. Ravi Shankar of the Friends Hockey Association wants what public-sector recruiters like the Port and the Railways used to provide, a ground and a coach, restored as a baseline. Gallyot wants multipurpose halls in the spirit of the old Gymkhana ground, which packed a dozen sports into four or five acres, rather than more single-purpose stadiums. None of it, they agree, is expensive by the standards of what has already been spent and wasted.

Murali Krishna recalled a line from his friend, the badminton coach Pullela Gopichand, that put the stakes in blunter terms still: “Either you build stadiums, or you build hospitals. A nation’s strength depends on the strength of its citizens. You build more stadiums, you need to build fewer hospitals.” What exists, everyone who spoke insisted, is talent: on the coast, among tribal children in Srikakulam, in a hockey club that has kept its academy running on its own funds for 50 years, in a coach still teaching four subsidised students at a government court because the city made him who he is.

“This land is not simply the location of our centre,” Sindhu said of Visakhapatnam. “It is where my gratitude to Andhra Pradesh is taking physical form.” Gallyot’s own hope is smaller, and no less telling of what is still missing.

“It is my dream, before I retire, to have a hockey AstroTurf and a synthetic athletics track,” she said. Twenty-five years after Malleswari’s bronze, whether that dream, and the larger one it stands in for, is finally built will decide if Andhra Pradesh’s next Olympian trains at home, or has to leave to become one.