OI Exclusive: Congress MP Karti Chidambaram Calls India's Performance At Paris Olympics "Very Modest"

In an exclusive conversation with Oneindia, Congress MP Karti Chidambaram shared his thoughts on various topics including India's performance at the Paris Olympics 2024. Karti lauded athletes who won medals for India but underlined that in this Olympics, unfortunately, India's performance was very, very modest.

"I mean, as it is, a few medal hopes have already fallen by the wayside, and a few more are there, but our performance will be very, very moderate," Karti Chidambaram said.

He spoke against India hosting the Olympics, stating "there will be a disaster if India hosts the Olympics".

"First and foremost, we are a sporting superpower For us, the first goal should be to become a dominant force in the sporting world by winning things significantly, which we are not even close to achieving," Congress MP said.

He further said that "holding an Olympics has huge costs, and you create infrastructure which will never be used again because we don't have the sporting leagues that can use these infrastructures constantly. If you even do an audit of existing stadiums in India, you will realize that we use them very, very sparingly. The Olympics itself is a very expensive project, and we must learn lessons from Athens and Rio, which have been complete disasters."

"It's okay for first-world countries, which already have tremendous infrastructure, to just add on a little bit more to conduct the Olympics. But for countries that don't have that kind of infrastructure, it's not just stadiums; it has to be hotel rooms, roads, subway, and a whole checklist for conducting the Olympics, which is huge. I think it'll be a misadventure if we go on that path, and we shouldn't be doing it just for the sake of it," he added.