Inspiring sporting excellence — Rushdee Warley on the IIS story

Rushdee Warley, the CEO of IIS, spoke with  Sportstar about the work the institute is doing, the use of sport science in training as well as the challenges to produce sporting excellence in India.

Published : Mar 30, 2023 09:46 IST , DELHI - 8 MINS READ

“Our mission is to create a world-class athlete training environment and that happens to include rehab also,” says Rushdee Warley, the CEO of IIS.
“Our mission is to create a world-class athlete training environment and that happens to include rehab also,” says Rushdee Warley, the CEO of IIS. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
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“Our mission is to create a world-class athlete training environment and that happens to include rehab also,” says Rushdee Warley, the CEO of IIS. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

From the time they started operations in 2018, the Inspire Institute of Sport, located in Vijaynagar near the town of Bellary in Karnataka, has earned a reputation of being one of the finest sports facilities in the country. 

Neeraj Chopra underwent rehabilitation here for an elbow injury prior to winning the Olympic gold in Tokyo, while two-time boxing world champion Nikhat Zareen and national record holder in long jump Jeswin Aldrin has been training here for several years now. 

Rushdee Warley, the CEO of IIS, spoke with  Sportstar about the work the institute is doing, the use of sport science in training as well as the challenges to produce sporting excellence in India 

How many kids do you have training at IIS currently? 

245 -260 kids across programmes in boxing, judo, wrestling, track and field and our U13 and U15 youth football academy. I am building another hostel for 120 kids, and I can probably build another one for a further 120. 

Do you have a wish list in a way where you want to see the next Olympic cycle? Have you thought of adding more sports to your programme? 

One of the things that we’ve done really well has been focusing on a few disciplines. Though we officially opened in 2018, our first bunch of athletes came in 2017, in disciplines like boxing, judo, wrestling and track & field, where we have had fantastic success with young athletes. We have worked very hard to understand the impact our environment has had on the athletes and be very clear about what we are trying to achieve. So, we have systematically built everything here so that when we have a good result, we know exactly what we are doing and how we are doing it right. 

There are many residential sports facilities in India, many with excellent facilities as well. Not all of them are able to consistently produce excellence. There isn’t always the motivation to push themselves to the next level. 

If you walk around the facility, you will see the pride in which we manage our environment; and that goes across all sectors, be it food, academics, horticulture, landscaping, coaching, sports science, etc. I would say that’s probably our unique selling point — the environment that we are working on creating. 

We work hard in choosing the kind of people we generally recruit. Some of the staff that we have brought in here are exceptionally talented young individuals who are hungry to make a mark for themselves. Some of them have been picked up by the Sports Authority of India (SAI) while others have gone on to take up deep positions in international programs, in countries like Australia and Scotland.  

Rushdee Warley: “If you walk around the facility, you will see the pride in which we manage our environment.”
Rushdee Warley: “If you walk around the facility, you will see the pride in which we manage our environment.” | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
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Rushdee Warley: “If you walk around the facility, you will see the pride in which we manage our environment.” | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

IIS is probably best known because it’s here that Neeraj Chopra did his rehabilitation after his elbow surgery. Do you want to extend that program? 

Our mission is to create a world-class athlete training environment and that happens to include rehab also. I understand what you’re saying, but we are not a rehab centre. We happen to do rehab very well. I think there are places in India where there are rehab facilities, but I just think we do it better. We’ve got everything on-site in one place. I’ve got my physiotherapy team, doctor on site, nutritionists, etc. And they only need to walk maybe about 60 meters from their room down into the high-performance centre in order to access everything. Pawan Sherawat is doing his rehab here, Udanta Singh from BFC, and Amit Mishra is formerly with DC. So, we get rehab requests from all kinds of sports. 

Neeraj Chopra underwent rehabilitation at the IIS for an elbow injury prior to winning the Olympic gold in Tokyo
Neeraj Chopra underwent rehabilitation at the IIS for an elbow injury prior to winning the Olympic gold in Tokyo | Photo Credit: ANI
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Neeraj Chopra underwent rehabilitation at the IIS for an elbow injury prior to winning the Olympic gold in Tokyo | Photo Credit: ANI

But having said that, we’d like to be known as a place that produces rather than just inherits players. You have athletes like Jeswin, who no one even knew the name of, jumping 8.42. Have you heard of a wrestler from Hyderabad? Nikhil Yadav has come here from Hyderabad, worked with our team, gone on to world junior champs, and world cadet champs and won a medal. The systems that we are looking to put in place are for creating an environment where the athletes can perform. 

What does it take to create a high-performance sports facility? 

The purpose of this facility is to produce Olympic champions. We are really blessed with the support that we have from the lives of the Jindal family. We happen to have a promoter that is extremely passionate about sports, and that is a legitimate passion. You’ve got to have the desire and the vision, and there has to be a desire to build that. 

The other challenge is to find the best people for the job. It wouldn’t be an issue for me to go out and hire a boxing coach who has won multiple Olympic medals or international titles. But the person that you want for the job would be somebody that is able to develop boxers from a youth level to senior level. Now, a medal-winning coach is not necessarily going to be able to do that. 

When you talk about transfer of knowledge do you also mean sports science? 

Right now, I have five research projects going on simultaneously at IIS, including one by IIT Madras. The cohort they are researching is Indian athletes, on which there’s not a lot of research, and that is a very serious issue. Most of the scientific literature out there is based on European athletes. But you can’t compare a European athlete to an Indian athlete because there is a genetic difference as well as a cultural gap. There is a difference in how they have grown up in terms of sports experience and exposure. European athletes would have done multi sports for a long time. Indians typically come from a single sport background. All that makes a difference in how you train them. 

To answer your question, everything around Neeraj during his recovery was so calculated. We were looking at collagen tablets for muscular recovery and stuff like that. For us, the philosophy isn’t specifically around sports science but around the coaching program. That doesn’t mean the coach decides everything. It means that the coach needs to be able to work with the experts around them. More often than not, the data confirms what the coach already knows from a subjective point of view. The coach needs to be able to articulate a vision to these experts so that they can provide what it is that they’re looking for in order to achieve the vision that the coach wants to give you. 

You have worked in multiple countries – as a high-performance manager in Swimming South Africa and then as a performance consultant with Sport New Zealand. What are some of the methods that you feel could be implemented in India? 

My biggest learning experience was in New Zealand where I saw how it was treated as a business. They’ve got a limited population and they’re very clear about which sports are the ones they can convert into a medal. So, you’ve got to be very clear about what your goals are and obviously, in terms of funding it’s not as big as what it is anywhere else. 

Now, what I learned was to see sport as creating a type of business and investing accordingly. You don’t have government bureaucracy in terms of how you respond to things. You don’t have the kind of bureaucracy that is going to hamper you in terms of your agility. And we were very clear about our investment principles and there were certain parameters that we looked at before investing in any sport. 

And it wasn’t only performance — performance was one of the factors — but related to what was the state of the national federation, and do they have good governance in place. Do they have full-time staff in place? Do they have long-term contracts with their coaches? Do they have a cohort of athletes that have evidence of performance? Do they have good financial systems and processes in place? Now, if you are an investor in a business, those are all the things that you look at. 

What I would like to see within India is that you have professional structures that are backing athletes. What is needed is a federation with a full-time CEO that has coaches on long-term contracts. I mean, India’s got, what, 1.3 - 1.4 billion people? I don’t think we are utilizing it to the maximum. 

Is accessibility to sport a problem in India? 

I don’t think things are inaccessible at the elite level. Even IIS is just a 5-hour car drive from Bangalore. I do think accessibility to sport in general is an issue. I don’t think there are enough opportunities for kids to play sports in India. Whereas if you go to New Zealand or Australia or South Africa, kids are playing sports just for the sake of playing sports, nothing else, and out of that comes performance. In my personal case, my son in New Zealand participated in water polo, athletics, state level football, swimming and a bunch of other sports and it got to point that we had to ask him to drop one because we didn’t have enough time for him in the day. But this is the life of a normal school athlete in New Zealand. In South Africa, it is compulsory to have one summer sport and one winter sport. That level of physical literacy that the kids learn at a very young age really keeps them in a very good space when they start moving into a specialised sport.  

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