India needs to separate welfare sports from international professional sport

As India aspires to host the Olympic Games and goes on overdrive with its infrastructure development, it must also have a close look at the sports fitness and training situation of its athletes, given a respectable medal tally as hosts are a bare minimum requirement. In professional international sports, which the Olympics now represent (no longer for amateurs as it used to be), it is imperative that athletes are at prime fitness levels, in order to perform at their best. Basic one would say.

But it is here that India faces its greatest challenge. While those like access, exposure, infra, money and social security through jobs and endorsements have been overcome to a great extent over the past decade and a half, what has slipped through the cracks has been world class fitness and training to the most eligible.

Here it is pertinent to note that those like superstar Neeraj Chopra have spent a majority of their time since their youth days training abroad and with top proven foreign coaches. Thank God for it. So did Abhinav Bindra in a sport where the mental side needs to be developed more than the physical. 

The likes of Neeraj and P.V. Sindhu who have joined the league of global elite sportsmen and women, were also blessed with naturally fit body structures on which top level coaching and training were able to build on. Therefore their extended success.

It gives us an insight into what is required to be done when it comes to identifying and developing top sporting talent. What body structures should you be looking at. What social and genetic backgrounds should you be looking at.

Every sport at the highest international level requires particular physical characteristics. You can't be BIG if you are a distance runner, you better be tending towards lean. On that base you build endurance and strength. Similarly, you cannot be stunted if you are a pole vaulter or badminton player. 

If by chance you are, you better be exceptional in the sport. Like Jan Ove Waldner was in Table Tennis or Muggsy Bogues in Basketball or Messi or Maradona in Football, the likes of which cannot be produced by a system. Remember, the intention being to maximise the chances of success.

If you follow Indian sports as we do you will find a disturbing pattern in recent times. We must be the country with the maximum withdrawls on the Badminton tour, our top wrestler failed to make weight in the wrestling worlds, both our top distance runner and top women's hurdler are out of action for months due to injury and the footballers, supposed to be the fittest of the lot, are so injury prone that teams and franchises ensure minimum playtime for them. The lesser we speak of injury management of our cricketers, the better.

It brings us to the question as to why this is happening so often and what needs to be done to prevent it. What we are also seeing currently is that the transition from junior or youth to senior is not happening. We are into the second batch after Sindhu and three after Saina for example in badminton and there is no light. Single flames are flickering in solitude in Athletics, Archery, Boxing, Golf, Squash, Table Tennis, Tennis, Weight-lifting and Wrestling- all sports that India should have been global powerhouses by now, but have in-fact regressed in in recent times. Just check out the result of the worlds this year.

These are also sports which require extreme levels of physical fitness and hard training. Gone are the days when golfers used to be non-athletes. Yes, even golf today requires top levels of physical and mental fitness and training to develop power consistently over longer distances and four days playing almost every week.

It is clear therefore that we need to begin where it begins. To select athletes with known history of malnutrition is a sin committed on the athlete and the sport itself. To select athlete for all sports from the same regions is also very daft. Welfare sports needs to be separated from Professional International Sport.

Discipline then needs to be instilled on those with strong nutritional and genetic bases because even a genius cannot deliver without training. Naturally then, only those properly schooled would understand such ethos and buy into it. It is then that you make a start. Else mediocrity as it is now, will be our ethos and we will continue to woefully underperform.

With LA28 as goal, time for teenaged athletes to break through

Sport one has always believed, particularly of the international Olympic competitive kind, is for the young. The greatest of international sporting performances come about when an athlete is at the peak of their fitness and prowess, which is generally when they are very young, historically no more than 22-23 years of age. That is generally when young men and women in an ideal world, are either into college or have just graduated.

Boris Becker, the legendary German tennis star won Wimbledon when he was just 17. Kylian Mbappe the French Footballer was a world cup winner at 19 and Simone Biles the greatest ever US gymnast was world champ at 16. The likes of Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt were Olympic champion at 22-23. 

Even if you go further back, Mohammed Ali, arguably the world’s greatest ever sportsman, was 18 when he won gold at the Rome Olympics and the Romanian gymnastic legend Nadia Comaneci, was only 14 when she was Olympic gold and delivered the first ever perfect 10.0 score in history.

Therefore while tracking Olympic athletes and the probable stars of the next Olympics, in this case Los Angeles 2028, one is tempted to look at upcoming teenaged top performers, more than the experienced and established stars, if one were to derive a realistic idea of a nation’s chances in the quadrennial sporting showpiece.

What 2025 has told India in that regard is that all is not lost and hope there certainly is, but will the transition to champions happen? What indicators have we got?

For example, if Anmol Kharb (18) had beaten Akane Yamaguchi and Ratchanok Intanon, both icons in women’s badminton, back to back to win the Arctic Open in Finland, a Super 500 or a midranking tournament on the tour, one could have been excited. The likes of Saina Nehwal and P.V. Sindhu were doing such things at that age and more. 

Or if India’s newest women’s pistol sensation Suruchi Phogat, just 19 and a world number one, wins the world championship gold in Cairo in November, it will definitely make a bold statement on Indian shooting now being a permanent world power of the sport.

Breakthrough performances are needed and they are needed early. It not only gives the athletes and their supporting ecosystem loads of confidence, but also makes the world, your peers and fellow competitors look at you in a different way, helping you get results even on bad days.

Abhinav Bindra’s Beijing Olympics gold was preceded by a world championship gold two years earlier. Neeraj Chopra’s U20 World title was a forerunner to his Tokyo Olympics gold five years later.

India has a wealth of young world class athletes across Olympic sports at the moment, some teenaged, some just out, thanks to the huge fillip provided to the Olympic movement by the Government. 

So on a day when Himanshu Jakhar broke Neeraj Chopra’s longstanding national U20 record to qualify for the U20 worlds and become India’s newest entrant to the 80m club, one just hopes that the buds of 2025, are in full bloom come 2028. 

A day to remember for the Indian Olympic Movement- Neeraj crosses 90!

The date should and will be remembered for years to come. The indefatigable Neeraj Chopra, arguably one of the greatest to have ever competed in the men's javelin, threw 90.23m in his 5th attempt on May 16, 2025, at the Doha Diamond League elite competition, to become one among 26 ever to have crossed that hallowed mark. German Julian Webber (the 26th) did beat him on the night with a 91.06 for his sixth and final attempt, but the significance of Neeraj's fifth should not be lost on the Indian sports ecosystem.

Neeraj's Friday night effort at the Qatar Sports Club in Doha is akin to winning a Tennis Grand Slam or a Golfing Major or hitting the 2800 ELO rating in Chess for example. For the simple reason that only a select few in history achieve such feats in their respective sport. 

The mark is to be celebrated not because it takes a monkey of everyone's back as the champ himself put it, but because Neeraj continues to prove that Olympic and World champions in the truest sense can quite easily be produced in this country. The dedication, love and passion and most importantly this constant urge to remain consistent and get better regardless of competition results, is what makes Neeraj's career a stuff of dreams as far as Indian sport is concerned.

Remember he is a former Olympic and World Champion, who has not won gold in the big ones in the past two years and while that has the possibility of doubts creeping in, Neeraj has just become better and better at a personal level. 

The Doha DL also saw Parul Chaudhary, an Asian Games champ, better her women's 3000m steeplechase national record by a significant margin of over 2 seconds and qualify for the world championships in Tokyo later in the year. No mean feat in itself on the same parameters as Neeraj's above.

Also on the day, teenager and chess prodigy Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, won the Superbet Classic in Romania and the India U-19 Football team under coach Bibiano Fernandez registered a fluent and pleasing to the eye 3-0 win over Maldives to make the SAFF U-19 final against Bangladesh.

We need more of such barriers as Neeraj has broken, to be breached of course. Many more. 

The Shooters have shown spunk this year but that has been expected over the years. Other than that not much of note at the international level for Indian Olympic sports except some notable performances like that of Deepika Kumari's World Cup stage gold reiterating her world-class credentials and yet another Olympian Anush Agarwalla, coming up with a personal best Dressage score in an Equestrian Grand Prix in Germany on his new horse Etro. These yet again pointing to individual determination and hunger, to get better and succeed.

We hope Neeraj's throw inspires all our athletes and support staff across sports like Badminton, Tennis, Boxing, Wrestling, Table Tennis, Golf, Swimming and Squash, besides Athletics, to step up their game and deliver on the big stages. The respectable position, as we as a great nation of the world deserve, on the Olympic medal tally, looks within reach thanks to Neeraj. It is up to us to go and grab it.

Events galore, but performance upgrade in Indian sport still a mirage

A fresh international season for almost all sports are now well and truly underway, with the Olympic year now well and truly in the background. And by all accounts a huge dichotomy has probably taken firm roots as far as sports in India- the non-cricket version of it, is concerned.

Sports events are now national policy. Be it the excuse of the Khelo India scheme, mushrooming of myriad leagues, age-group tournaments across gender and inclusivity and of course regular domestic and international tournaments of all and any denomination. 

It has come to a situation that on a 2-21/2 page sports spread in any leading daily newspaper, only 30% of sporting activities happening in the particular edition city can get covered. A part of the reason is also commercial but most of it is because there is actually no space or personnel to cover them.

Which is great the discerning neutral will say. India is playing a lot and therefore a sports culture is taking shape and therefore the results will come. Not quite that simple.

To organise and host sporting events is just a tiny piece of the jigsaw. While it is very helpful as they give athletes more opportunities to play and who can be against that, but is there a plan or is the plan something other than sport. Because if its not purely focussed on growing sport and establishing a sports culture, it is doomed to fail. For example if the intention is money laundering or generation and monopoly over entertainment content for example.

Establishing a sporting culture in the society at large which naturally draws a child to pick up one or many sports, has several other key elements besides event participation, hosting and organising, and most of it includes effective political Governance, outside the purview of this forum.

So even as we are flooded with sporting results of all kinds coming in from around the country and indeed the world- the sum total of all the noise and activities with our official 2036 Olympic bid at its heart, is not being reflected on the results that matter. In-fact I dare say that there has been a consistent decline all around save maybe a couple at max.

In Badminton, a sport that gave the most hope and joy to Indians in the millennium, given its long and natural association, connect and popularity with the urban society across India, our shuttlers don't not only win anything of note, they seemed to be exiting en masse within the first or second rounds. Its almost unbelievable that we were Thomas Cup champions just three years back. 

While Badminton has seen the most shocking decline in standards and results given what it had already achieved, other hitherto profitable (from top medals perspective) sports of India like Boxing and Wrestling also see no hope in the horizon. The top news coming out of these sports nowadays are only political and administrative in nature, which is telling.

The idea at the moment, seems to be, we get 6-7 medals as it is in Olympics, let's add cricket, compound archery, squash and a few tweaks here and there by influencing IOC through our IOC members and get to double digits and go to town with it as huge achievement. However, sometimes when your intention is to cover the face, your butt might get exposed, so it's important to be aware of that.

The other problem is the league mania which seems to have gripped the nation. This year is looking at, at least three new franchise leagues in sports like Shooting, Archery, 3*3 Basketball, among others.

Not one league in India, whether commercially successful or not, has been able to throw up one single athlete of international stature, in now about two decades of their existence. 

They have to still drag stars from previous generations into active play, to draw fans and revenue. Naturally, because new stars are not emerging. Naturally again, because stars emerge only when they perform exceptionally and not like clones of each other maintaining status quo.

Leagues are required in sport to develop and provide opportunities to young upcoming talent. They ensure depth of talent, increasing reach of the sport and become a pathway to the real deal which is international glory. 

In India, Football, Kabaddi, Badminton, Volleyball, Table Tennis, Tennis and even Cricket, declined in international standing after the introduction of their leagues. The data is very clear. Therefore something is wrong and the approach and vision on leagues needs a major overhaul.

Rishabh Yadav and Jyothi Sureka did win the compound mixed team gold at the year's first Archery World Cup stage in Florida which did not see the participation of powerhouses Korea, right after it was announced as an Olympic sport. Sourav Kothari also became Billards World Champion for a second time. And of course a new teenaged star in Shooting has emerged with Suruchi winning unprecedented back to back World Cup stage golds showing true class. 

It is also mandated policy nowadays to always be positive in the end and therefore I thought it apt to end with good news. Well we all are positive aren't we? Which is why we are here and all still trying. But what is required for Indian sports is not just positivity, but clarity, rationality and sanity