'Khelo India' is here but 'Jeeto at Olympics India' still looks distant

'Khelo India' was the recent big ticket sports policy implementation with an eye to achieving Olympic Glory, undertaken by the country. In a nutshell it was a kind of Junior National Games organized in the capital involving school going athletes amidst much fanfare, as is the norm of the times. While the intent is to be lauded, the fact that 'its the best idea they could come up with'  should be a cause of concern.

This is the year when we get into the proper Olympic cycle for Tokyo 2020 and Rio 2016 still looks so recent. Soon Tokyo 2020 quota and qualifying events will begin and before you know it the Olympics will be upon us again. How much have we progressed in our quest for Olympic glory? What are the chances in Tokyo?....or beyond?

It will be safe to comment at this point that Tokyo will not be our best ever Olympic year. That would mean surpassing the six medals we won in London 2012, which looks quite improbable, to put it bluntly. There is good news coming through in sports and we probably have also been able to maintain the rising graph, but Big Wins, specially in Olympic events continue to elude us, which is a problem. Those Big Wins uplift a total ecosystem of athletes and administrators both financially and psychologically. Gives us the chance of having more than one medal hopeful in a given sport and therefore a better chance at medals overall.

Take Badminton for example, by far our strongest Olympic sport for a while. Outside the Olympics, The All England, the World Championships, Asian Games and Asian Championships are the Big Four in World Badminton to win apart from the Thomas, Uber and Sudirman Cups at the Team level. India still have a complete blank in all of the above in recent times. Sindhu and Saina no doubt have come the closest to winning Big and you cannot hold anything against those two masterclasses....the bottomline however is, we haven't won. I think the Commonwealth Games is the best that we have won apart from the BWF series events, which we are very strong at but they are basically pro tour events with very low memory-value globally. So that needed to happen before something pleasantly unprecedented could be expected in Tokyo. Recent performances at the Badminton Asia Championships do not inspire that confidence.

A pleasant development has been a Bronze by Aruna Budda Reddy at the Gymnastic World Championships in Women's Vault. 'Veteran' Ashish Kumar also reached a final at the World's which basically tells us that there is now a semblance of a gymnastics system perpetuated in the country. Its a breakthrough medal and no mean feat make no mistake about it- being the first for the country at a World level competition. Gymnastics gives you a shot at a lot of medals at the Olympics and its being an addition to the our list of medal hopeful sports is a good development. Kudos to all those responsible to bring it to this level. Am sure there is a long way to go still but at least a start has been made.

Shubhankar Sharma has also burst into the world Golf scene with two magnificent victories on the European Tour across two continents and both away from home at the ripe young age of 21. His emergence along with Anirban Lahiri's continued impressive showing on the world leading PGA tour bodes well for the sport's chances from an Indian perspective at Tokyo. The Golfing graph of India has also been on a consistent upswing at a global level and we fans can take heart but again that Major victory, those big wins on the PGA Tour remain elusive, which leaves a medal in the Olympics more to chance than conviction.

The other 'strength' Olympic sports of India like Archery, Wrestling, Boxing, Shooting, Tennis, Weightlifting and Hockey are in a state of stagnation, as in either at the same level globally or a few notches down from their peaks which is the major reason for my predictions for Tokyo. The odd good news will trickle through at times in these disciplines, but nothing which can make the fan really excited on Olympic prospects. Women's tennis and Shooting have shown some spark at junior and youth levels and it remains to be seen how the lot progresses.

What is happening at a real slow pace, inhibiting the progress of the Olympic movement in the country, is access to quality infrastructure and training. The odd facilities are found nowadays mainly in urban pockets but clearly it needs to happen across the length and breadth of the country in a planned and systematic manner with clearly defined targets. In the hinterlands its still more passion than programme.

What is killing our Olympic prospects further is the proliferation of sports agents, before a system of achieving real global success at a consistent level has been formulated. The buying and selling of players as commodities for commercial gains, is taking precedence over everything else. Take the example of a Dheeraj Singh- the India U-17 goalkeeper who earned a name for himself with some eye-catching performances. The fact that he had a long way to mature before trying his luck at the tough pro-football lands of Europe was fairly evident. But he took the call to abandon regular game time with senior professional squads and instead hunt for a trial call from any however nondescript 'european brand' club. This is clearly 'agents' at work in the search for quick money. Someone's got it all wrong.

So till the above anomalies are corrected, lets keep the passion going and hold on to the few sparks we have, because thats the best we fans can do.

The World Leading Throw in Women's Shot Put This Year Belongs To An Indian!

The kind of sporting event which compels you to write as an Indian sports fan happened in Jinhua, China on Monday, April 24, 2017. Manpreet Kaur, a 26-year old from Ambala, Punjab, not only struck Gold in the Women's Shot Put at the Asian Grand Prix meet, but also registered a world leading throw with her effort. Now, a world leading mark registered just four months into the year is no big deal one would say, but for our breed it is. Sports fans in India have grown up reading or hearing about such news every year at least twice or thrice....but one would be hard pressed to recall an Indian ever having achieved this in Track and Field. Maybe during the times of P.T.Usha, but yours truly at least can't recall even her being the protagonist of such news ever. This kind of news generally has significance in World Track and Field as it makes competitors and other stakeholders sit up and take notice. They assess or reassess their goals for the year, particularly in the year of a World Championship, which by the way is just four months away.

For the record, Manpreet achieved a distance of 18.86 m, which to put it in perspective, would have earned her a creditable 6th place at the Rio 2016 summer Olympics. What her performance in Jinhua also did was make her qualify automatically for the World Championships. The only cause of concern would be an improvement of close to a meter in less than six months. Even more heartening to the fan would be the performance of Neeraj Kumar, the junior Javelin World Champion, who won Silver with a fling of 82.11 m. This is below his personal best of 86.48 set last year, but its great to see consistency with distances coupled with international medal winning performances. Here's wishing both Manpreet and Neeraj a great World Championships.

Badminton continues taking one giant stride after another for the Indian Olympic movement when in this month's Singapore Open Super Series Men's Final, for the first time in the history of Indian and world badminton, two Indians competed for a Super Series title. B. Sai Praneeth eventually got the better of Kidambi Srikanth to claim his first Super Series title in three closely fought sets, but Indian badminton had been already declared the winner before the final. Indians have already claimed two Super Series titles this year with P.V. Sindhu's win in the Women's final of the Indian Open against her Olympic Final nemesis Carolina Marin of Spain.

SSP Chawrasia, the diminutive gleamy eyed Kolkata golfer also continued to delight the golfing world with his mastery of the home courses, defending his Indian Open Golf title, this time at the newly laid Gary Player course at the DLF Golf & Country Club in Gurugram, Haryana. This was his second title in five months and an astonishing fourth European Tour title to go with his six Asian Tour  wins. Through sheer simplicity and the rare ability to enjoy the big moments, SSP has endeared himself to the Indian golfing audiences in particular and has clearly maximized his ability, talent and passion for the game on the international stage. Such players draw more kids to the game. Anirban Lahiri meanwhile continues to impress in his sophomore year on the PGA tour, the toughest in the game. He is in the top 70 on the money list, which means he has had top finishes. This to follow a great rookie year on the tour, bodes well.

India also had a great Shooting World Cup stage at home at the Dr. Karni Singh Ranges in New Delhi with star shooter Jitu Rai's Gold in the 50m Pistol and an Indian 1-2 in the event with Amanpreet winning Silver, being the showstopper. Ankur Mittal's Silver in Double Trap was also classy, given a top field. Ankur followed that up with a Gold in the second stage held a month later in Acapulco Mexico. Pooja Ghatkar continued her good form from last year to land a World Cup Bronze in the Women's 10m Air Rifle while Sheeraz Sheikh in the Men's Skeet displayed considerable improvement with a final round show, eventually finishing 6th.

Amidst all this though, one sport which has caught a new kind of imagination of the sports buffs in India has been football. Slowly but surely there has been a new kind of fan-pull for Indian football. Some of the fans maybe the same, but the pull is different this time. All this could be due to the 'push from the very top' and great media mileage generated through ISL to begin with and then taken to a different level by recent successes of the Indian team and a fairytale called Aizawl FC. The team from the tiny north-eastern hill state of Mizoram, at one point not supposed to play in the country's top FIFA recognised football league, today needs a point to be crowned champions of the 10th Hero I-League, after a string of heroic performances. It couldn't have come at a better time with probably the biggest single-sport event the country has ever seen, the FIFA U-17 World Cup, scheduled to be held in the country in October this year. All these big media events could only do a world of good to Indian football.

The exciting thing happening in Indian sports though is not restricted to the increasing regularity of world class performances across various Olympic sports on a world-class stage. What is exciting is that there is lots happening outside the realm of Olympic sports as well, which are probably sowing the first seeds to national sporting/outdoor culture. Recently, Northern Motorsports, the guys who pioneered off-track and off-road motorsport through events such as the Raid-de-Himalayas and the Desert Storm, organized the India Baja 2017, which this year became the first Indian Rally to be a part of the Dakar Challenge series. The second edition of the Indian Open Surfing has also been announced and is expected to see more than 100 surfers take part in the pristine and beautiful beaches of Mangalore. Add all the above to the 'holy' (there is always something holy in India) sport of cricket and the signs are good. Do not forget the mission....a top ten finish at the summer Olympics:))

The Quest for Glory at Tokyo 2020 Has to Begin Now!

Its been a while no doubt. You can attribute it to the Olympics hangover. That is the beauty of the Games. It keeps you in awe even if your own nation is not quite setting the Olympic arenas on fire. It was a disappointing Indian performance to say the least. We returned with two medals and at one point, the horror days of the 80s n 90s were coming back to haunt at the possibility of a blank medals return, but thankfully Sakshi Malik and PV Sindhu saved the blushes much to the elation of their 1.3 billion countrymen and women. Kudos to them!

The Athletes are least to blame for the 'Rio Debacle' though. Two-third of them shouldn't have been there in the first place. The rest did manage to elevate the competitiveness of Indian athletes overall from the previous games and in many more sporting disciplines as well. The fact that the desired results did not materialize can be put down to bad talent management. Take the case of Saina Nehwal who clearly played with an injury. Or the shooters, who despite shooting at their highest competitive level at any Olympics collectively as a squad, failed to win a medal. A report chaired by a committee headed by Abhinav Bindra post the games, basically put it down to training and fitness issues and lack of proper monitoring of the same by the national federation. Contrast that to the Italian shooters who despite not quite burning the ranges in the years leading up to the Olympics, got results where it mattered most. Talent needs to be managed scientifically without any compromise on discipline, in a way that performances peak at the big stage. To make matters worse, we even commit self-goals in pursuing Olympic medals as we did with the mess created with the Narsingh Yadav issue.

Clearly, a comprehensive and focussed agenda for success is missing. The good part is that the Government seems to have woken up to the situation and post the Olympics, the right noises have been made and on-ground proactivity displayed, which was not the case earlier. What they will also do well, is to realize, that today in India, we thankfully have 13 individual Olympic medalists very much at hand to lean back upon for advice, apart from the hockey veterans. We also have a double Olympic winning coach in Pullela Gopichand available. They need to lead our Olympic Mission from the forefront and not just be appointed to showpiece positions without empowerment.

There is frankly no reason why we cannot achieve the Olympic glory we deserve because Indian sport even with all its administrative and structural shortcomings, has been on the upswing, albeit very gradually given the challenges. This is however the case with every aspect of life in the world's largest democracy, which is probably also the most complex and diverse.

Badminton and Golf are today probably India's top performing Olympic sport globally. Both have been very consistent in doling out quality international performances year after year for at least the past two decades. And both have been raising the bar for themselves with every passing year as well, which is even more gratifying to the fan. This year, apart from Sindhu's Rio Silver, at least six international titles have been won in Badminton. This includes Sindhu's brilliant win at the prestigious China Open recently. Four international titles have also been won by the men golfers in places like Korea, The Philippines and Indonesia apart from India. Anirban Lahiri also finds himself in the top-20 money list of the coveted PGA tour. And after making it to the Olympics, the World Cup of Golf beckons now, scheduled to begin in Melbourne in the next 24 hours. Aditi Ashok has also been scorching the golfing greens and recently became the first Indian woman to win on the Ladies European Tour.

It is no wonder then that Siril Verma is the junior world number one in Badminton and Shubham Jaglan won the Junior World Golf Championships last year. In fact India's performances at the junior levels have been pleasing to say the least. Neeraj Chopra's world record javelin effort to catapult him to being India's first ever world champion at any level in athletics is awe-inspiring. Especially the distance he gained with his throw at such a young age. The junior shooters have been consistently winning Gold at Olympic events at the Junior Shooting World Cups and India's hockey juniors have also been winning abroad pretty consistently. Yes, Shooting and Hockey are probably the next two best performing Olympic sports of India at this point.

India's Olympic sport fans will continue to hope that Boxing, Wrestling and Weightlifting, the three other disciplines in which India had displayed considerable potential in, before treading on the path of self-destruction, resurrect themselves. With the appointment of a successful modern-era entrepreneur as the head of the national Boxing federation, better days can certainly be hoped for in the sport. Dipa Karmakar's Produnova became a rage during Rio and her astounding fourth-place showing at the Games also raises the hopes of a Gymnastics revolution in the country. Tennis, another medal near-miss at the Rio games for India, has always had the required lineage, tradition and infrastructure to throw up top quality players.

The Government therefore, will do well to identify these 9-10 disciplines for special investments and focus. They have some sort of good thing going about them in the country and if only the powers that be ensure that the enabling and supporting measures needed are in place, along with strict monitoring and discipline, results are bound to be very rewarding. The quest for glory at Tokyo 2020 needs to begin NOW!

When the National Open Trophy Returned to the Mecca of Indian Golf after 17 Years

With a beaming S.S.P. Chawrasia after his Hero Indian Open victory at the Delhi Golf Club

March 20, 2016

Not many remember Sk Jamshed Ali, one of India's earliest Arjuna awardees for the sport of Golf. It seems many credible sources of public information also do not have his name in the 'list'. Jamshed, India's first caddy-turned pro Golfer, won the coveted award way back in 1978. He honed his skills at the legendary Royal Calcutta Golf Club (RCGC), the world's second oldest golf course after the famous St. Andrews of Scotland. The legend of Jamshed Ali, still lives on at the famous 'caddy-basti' adjoining the wall of the 187 year old RCGC, the melting pot of so many of India's finest golfers.

S.S.P. Chawrasia's 2016 Hero Indian Open victory, in that context, should be celebrated for the continuation and progress of a healthy and passionate culture surrounding a sport, in a cricket mad country like India, while at the same time contributing immensely to quality and sustainable social upliftment. The Golfing culture of RCGC and the contribution it has made to the growth of the game in the country easily qualifies it as the 'Mecca of Golf' in the country. Even the legendary 'Biloo' Sethi became the first Indian to win the Indian Open at this hallowed course. Such is its sense of being associated with history.

S.S.P becomes the third 'home' golfer to win the National Open after Feroze Ali in 1993 and Arjun Atwal in 1999. RCGC would not have had to wait for 17 years if S.S.P had won it in any of his subsequent three runner-up finishes, after finishing second at the Open for the first time to Atwal in 1999. So en grained with 'Bengali Pride and Passion' is the otherwise cosmopolitan nature of the Club, that joke has it that they the faithful would also appropriate both Anirban Lahiri, a Bangalore bred golfer and Bangladesh's top Golfer Siddikur Rahman, both winners of the Indian Open, as one of their own given their 'bong' connections, without as much of a bat of the eyelid.

S.S.P carries on a glorious tradition which surprisingly is still very healthy, given growth of Golf is said to have a direct correlation to economic growth of a city/region/country and Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is now called, has not been in the news of good economic reasons for some time now. Apart from Arjun Atwal, who is still winning tournaments on the global tours as recently as last year, Rahil Gangjee and Shankar Das have also returned many encouraging results, more so Rahil. And if you ask the present RCGC pros they will tell you that they themselves are training many dreamy-eyed and talented youngsters at the Club to ensure a healthy pipeline of talented Golfers who can win laurels for the country.

S.S.P is easily the leading beacon at present for the club, notching up his 3rd European Tour victory to be one win short of Jeev Milkha Singh's Indian record of four, and one better than even the present world number 52 Anirban Lahiri's two. That makes it six European Tour victories for the Club now, if you were to add Atwal's three. The only PGA Tour win for India, being Atwal's, also adds to RCGC's glories. As do the innumerable Asian Tour and domestic Indian titles. Is there one single Golf Club in the country with so many incredibly credible numbers associated with it?And chances are that with S.S.P set to be one of the top two Indian Golfers to represent the country at the Rio 2016 Olympics, RCGC will soon have an Olympian amongst them.

The glorious tradition of Golfing success for the Club set by the likes of Jamshed Ali, Basad Ali (a 10 time Indian order of merit winner), Rafaq Ali, Feroze Ali and Arjun Atwal are hail and hearty and in able hands which is great for the sport in the country. You need passionate cultures for a sport to grow around it. In fact, such is the depth and diversity of talent at the RCGC, that even the present order of merit leader in women's professional golf in the country, Neha Tripathi is a RCGC prodigy, a past winner of the WGAI tour and is one of India's top woman pro-golfers of the country for the past 6-7 years. S.S.P himself is training his nephews to become golfers. So here's a 'Long Live' to one of India's greatest Golfing nurseries and wishing it many more golden years of Golfing success.  

Results in Sports a Direct Outcome of Priorities

  Kavita Raut became the fourth Indian lady to qualify for Rio 2016 in the Marathon!

An Olympic Year pushes you to write more. The buzz among the global sporting fraternity is so palpable! There is so much happening all around in the build-up- athletes are qualifying, getting banned, injured et. all. And you sometimes want to just let go and dive headlong into capturing all those moments, those 'stars in the making' and all those stories of extreme human ambition, dejection and perseverance against all odds.

News just came in that an Indian runner Kavita Raut has qualified for the Rio Olympics making her the fourth Indian woman to do so. She beat the qualifying mark by more than two secs....but the marathon has maximum participation among all Games events and qualifying standards are therefore kept pretty lenient. In another unrelated development New Zealand's World#1 Ranked Woman Golfer Lydia Ko has said that the Olympics will be her top priority this year. Reinforces the stature of the Games even among hard-core individual professional sportsmen and women.

Back home Indian athletes including Olympic hopefuls are busy grinding it out at the South Asian Games. The twelfth edition being played in the cities of Guwahati and Shillong. People in the know and well-wishers of Olympic sports in the country, including several high ranking federation officials associated with sports for a long time, have raised concerns around this disrupting preparation schedules in an Olympic year. In fact, causing more harm to them as sparring with well below par competition has its ill-effects....or so they say.

But we have taken an oath to be positive haven't we? And the way to look at it, is that it might just instill more confidence, get them into a winning habit and so on. Time will tell. However, what agonizes the sports fan no-end is why cannot the authorities be more pragmatic in an Olympic year? Would the results have been anymore different if the top Olympic hopefuls were allowed to give the event a miss? What makes a Sports Minister energize all his efforts into himself organizing and pulling no stops to ensure that a nondescript regional sporting event gets more attention than Olympic preparations? Can you imagine a Sports Minister of a country missing from the country's sporting base for months on end, with less than a year to go for the Olympics to begin?

Results are often a direct outcome of priorities. Lydia Ko's priorities are crystal clear. You will see that her results will follow as well- GK's Call!

We can only hope that ours are in the right place as well.

Six Months to Rio, Six the Benchmark!

Its six months to the day for the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games to kick-off and till date about 61 Indians have attained the qualifying standards to compete in them. There will be a few more after pending qualifiers of some sports are concluded. The final qualification opportunity for Asian shooters concluded this week by the way right here in New Delhi, It was heartening to see some sports loving nations like Singapore and Malaysia win their first ever quotas in the sport for Rio right here in India's capital city. The toil and tears which go into such massive human efforts is often missed by the mass-media in general, overeager and rightly so, to project successes closer home. India added four more Rio quotas to their existing eight to ensure a record participation of the sport in all Olympics and if performances of the last four years are anything to go by, then shooting should once again return as the country's most successful sport from the games. However we should have done more in Shooting and the 3-4 'near miss quotas' could come back to hurt us really hard at the end of the games. Read on to find out why.

The problem this time is that the benchmark is Six medals! Are we confident enough to surpass the mark which every nation progressing in the right direction should aspire to do as a bare minimum? This space a while before the London Games had emphatically stressed on Six medals as a certainty.! This time there is nothing that makes us overtly optimistic....even of touching that mark, leave alone bypassing it. Why?

By and large over the last four years if you have followed this space, you would find that the Olympic sports that have performed at a top international level for India continue to be the ones which were already an area of strength in the last games. Archery, Badminton, Boxing,Shooting, Tennis and Wrestling. The worry is that over the past four years in Archery, Boxing and Wrestling we have kinda stagnated as far as top international results are concerned, instead of being on an upswing. Combined we probably have four quality athletes ranked in the lower top 10s of the world across the 35 odd competition categories which will give away medals at the Olympics.

Shiva Thapa is perhaps the highest ranked at number two in his boxing weight category and Deepika Kumari and Mary Kom are probably the other significant names on that list but they have either remained at same performance levels or have gone down with age. To expect three medals from the above three disciplines would be being too optimistic given that the world is too young and fast nowadays to wait for athletes past their prime to to make lasting mark. Unless of course if you are an Usain Bolt! That leaves you with Shooting, Tennis and Badminton. Shooting has the potential to be a game changer for this trio if lady luck goes India's way at Rio and these three disciplines alone can then help us surpass the London mark or at least touch it. At their best your shooters can give you four medals, Shuttlers two and Tennis one to easily go past London. And then anything else we get will be a bonus:))

Golf is the other sport where we would be sending a quality side and have been doing really well at the top level in recent times. However its a debut for the sport and all the top guns of the world will be giving it their all so it would be very harsh to expect a medal out of the sport. Anirban Lahiri and SSP Chawrasia should make it on present form and rankings.

GK's Call!
And I know its a shame and it continues to be for decades now but we should not be expecting any medals at all from the Men's and Women's hockey team who have also qualified for Rio.-GK's Call!

If I were to be negative and add my personal experience to it, I would have to say that it is really sad that our internal political equations come in the way of progress of Olympic sports in this country....and so it is in any walk of life here. Here is hoping and continuing to hope that we reach double figures at least at Tokyo 2020! At the very least if we have any dignity left as a nation!-GK's Agony!

The way to look at it is obviously being positive. What we do have in the forthcoming games is Quality Olympic experience of winning medals. Abhinav Bindra, Gagan Narang, Saina Nehwal, Mary Kom, Yogeshwar Dutt and most probably Sushil Kumar give you that comforting company which previous Indian Olympic squads were deprived of. We need to cash in on this, hope that their presence energizes everyone to give off their best and that is our best chance to come back with our best ever performance from Rio!

Hockey Wins a Top Medal after Ages!

On a day when the national sport of hockey won a top international medal after three decades, I felt compelled to write:) There is nothing like a good day in hockey for us 'Indo-sportanatics'. For the record India bagged the Bronze in the Hockey World League Finals beating Holland in a penalty shootout in Raipur. This is after 1982. Jesus! Well, as mentioned in these posts, the signs were looking good for a while and it seemed only a matter of time. Of course, the new rules and our new found economic clout have also helped a lot lately. This medal however, will give the Indian Olympic squad bound for Rio in August of 2016, a whole new vigour! When hockey leads, India roars.

What a Pre-Olympic year it has been for Indian sports! One will have to believe that one has seen India building strong squads across Olympic sports for some time now and the labour has started to bear fruit. This column safely predicts that the previous years tally would be matched, if not surpassed and that in itself will be no mean feat.

Here is a peek into some of the strong Indian squads set for Rio:

Tennis:

• Strong doubles teams which include the legendary Leander Paes, world number 1 ladies doubles player Sania Mirza and multiple ATP tour title winner Rohan Bopanna give India a great chance of a medal in the sport at Rio. Somdev Dev Varman has been patchy in singles and so has Yuki Bhambri, but the doubles specialists should be able to hide this weak link and help sneek in a medal, given the format and number of medals on offer.

Shooting:

• Should give us the maximum medals from one discipline. Experienced medal winning Olympians like Abhinav Bindra and Gagan Narang are leading the squad and look hungry for medals. There is good depth and healthy competition within the squad making it a big squad of top class multiple international medal winners. Medals can be expected from unexpected sources.

Badminton

• This column has long hailed the squad as world class and it has only gotten better in the Pre-Olympic year. Saina has missed her much coveted top class world title by a whisker twice and PV Sindhu has reinforced her mercurial status over and over again. Srikanth after a subdued year seems to be peaking at the right time and Kashyap also seems to be building up towards top fitness during Rio. The bench strength and doubles teams have also been solid performers internationally and another medal from this sport can be a certainty.

Golf

• The top 5 finish in a Major by Anirban Lahiri means that the Indian golfing team to Rio has at least one current world class golfer in its ranks. Indian golf in general has had a strong year if the combined earnings is any kind of parameter to go by and with the right blend of youth and experience, on their day, they can be a very capable team.

Wrestling

• Led by the legendary Sushil Kumar and his mate Yogeshwar Dutt, younger turks like Narsingh Yadav and Amit Kumar are the ones to watch out for in the men's section. The Phogat sisters in the women's section also can spring a few surprises.

Boxing

• Never to be left behind in the Indian Olympic movement, the boxing squad has lost legendary veteran Vijender to the pro arena but still has a formidable squad with the likes of Shiva Thapa, Devendro Singh and Vikas Krishan capable of great deeds. And who can forget the legend of Mary Kom among the women boxers, not too forget the 'sure-to-be-hungry' Sarita Devi.

Hockey- we proved we can be in the top three of a world competition today.

So we have seven world class squads and other squads which are every improving like archery and weightlifting and can give us an Olympic medal any day if everything goes our way.

Therefore a repeat of the six medals of last time is a given. Can we get more??