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 lagInfrastructure 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.