Is sport about winning medals? Breaking records? Raising the bar? Or is sport also about life lessons? Making of a better society and better individuals?
For the longest time, the Olympic movement has been equated with a sports competition in India. The world’s greatest sporting spectacle which comes every four years and a nation is measured by the number of medals won. Needless to say India doesn’t really have a record to boast about. But then, is it just about a sports competition? If that was the case, then why use the term “movement”? Do we say the FIFA World Cup movement or the ICC World Cup movement? We don’t and that’s what differentiates the Olympic Games from every other sports competition in the world. The Olympics is also about values, about life lessons. It is a philosophy to make the world a better place.
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It was a delight to see each of these principles being implemented on ground in schools of Odisha under the aegis of the International Olympic Committee and the Abhinav Bindra Foundation ably supported by the Government of Odisha.
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“We started the pilot with some 40,000 children and now we will be scaling up to 200,000 children this year, ” said Abhinav Bindra, the prime mover behind the effort. “What we have seen here has exceeded our expectations. One thing is to hear about the progress being made, but it is an entirely different thing to see them for yourself. And to see students benefiting from the effort, seeing smiles on their faces, seeing teachers and students working with a perfect synergy gives me great hope for the Olympic movement in India,” said Angelia Teo, Director of the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, IOC.
Bindra has now taken the programme to Assam as well and one only hopes it will grow in scale in the months ahead. For the second year running, Bindra will be at the Trailblazers Conclave to speak about how sport changes lives and how he is now invested in making a difference to young people using all the learnings from sport over a career of 22 long years. One of the greatest ever, Bindra is also a torch-bearer for the Paris 2024 games.
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