India has one point four billion people and came home from Paris with six medals, not one of them gold. Seventy-first on the table.
Kenya has fifty-five million people. Eleven medals, four of them gold.
Ethiopia is poorer per head than India. Four medals.
Uganda is poorer still, with a population smaller than Uttar Pradesh alone. A gold and a bronze.
Every one of those countries is poorer than India, and every one of them beat it.
Thirty-five per cent of Indian children under five are stunted, which is the sub-Saharan African rate in a country several times richer.
Sixty-seven per cent of Indian children under five are anaemic.
Fifty-seven per cent of Indian women of childbearing age are anaemic, so a great many of those children were short of iron before they were born.
Forty-six million stunted children and twenty-five million wasted children live in India, both the largest numbers on earth.
India eats less meat per person than any large country in the world.
A skeleton, a heart and a nervous system are built once, between conception and roughly the age of two, out of whatever turns up on the plate.
What turns up, for tens of millions of Indian children, is rice, pulses and a glass of milk if the household can manage it.
Stunting is not a height problem. Every organ in the body is built to the same budget, and the heart and lungs get the same short rations as the legs.
A country can build every stadium it likes. The bodies were finished by the age of two.
You cannot sprint on a childhood you never had.
