The Asian Games Remind Us of Indians Who Win Despite the System

Satnam Singh and Salman Khan rowed their double scull to a bronze in Aichi last week. Every major games, a familiar forward makes its way through India's family WhatsApp groups. This time would have been no different. It performs the arithmetic such messages always do: 1.4 billion people. A handful of golds. China already past a hundred. Shame on us.

Look at the boat instead. Two men, a Sikh and a Muslim, one seated behind the other, neither able to see the other's face, pulling in a rhythm so exact that the hull seemed to forget it was being pushed. A double scull is an unforgiving vessel. If one rower is a fraction early, the boat yaws. If one sulks, it goes in circles. There is no room aboard for a third opinion.

The armchair medal auditor is a durable Indian species. He surfaces every two years with a population figure and a calculator, then vanishes the moment cricket starts. He is right that India underperforms its size. He is wrong about nearly everything else.

I spent part of my childhood in Fiji, a country of under a million people with two Olympic golds in rugby sevens, won because every village plays barefoot on every patch of grass. Years later, training in surgery in Bulgaria, I met another model: the sports boarding school, the state as coach, the child as project. It delivered medals per capita our auditor would envy and a good deal of quiet damage he would not.

Medals come from systems and from love. India has an abundance of the second and has spent decades starving the first.

As I write, with days still to run, India has won 63 medals, 10 of them gold, at Aichi-Nagoya. The auditor will point out that India finished fourth at Hangzhou with 106 medals, 28 of them gold. Fair enough. Now look at who won them.

Winning in spite of the system

The list reads like a railway timetable of the republic. Mirabai Chanu and Naorem Roshibina Devi from Manipur, a state that for three years has been discussed mostly in the vocabulary of curfews. Lovlina Borgohain of Assam, fighting her way into a final. Vithya Ramraj of Coimbatore, who ran the 400m hurdles in 54.75 seconds and broke P.T. Usha's national record, which had stood for 42 years as the oldest in Indian athletics.

Murali Sreeshankar of Kerala leapt 8.07 metres for silver on an ankle that forced him to withdraw from his last two jumps. Pooja Singh, a 19-year-old mason's daughter from Haryana, cleared 1.84 metres for a bronze that ended India's 24-year wait for a high jump podium.

Gulveer Singh from Uttar Pradesh collected three medals on the track. Animesh Kujur, from tribal Chhattisgarh, ran the mixed relay to bronze. 

And then there was the women's 4x400 metres relay, India's first athletics gold of these games, run by Kiran Pahal from Gummad village in Haryana's Sonipat district, Prachi Choudhary from Saharanpur in western Uttar Pradesh, Machettira Poovamma from Kodagu and Vithya Ramraj from Coimbatore. Kiran dedicating the victory to her father's dream.

Four women, four mother tongues and one baton, carried by daughters of a country where a girl is still too often the last to be fed at home, the first pulled from school by her community and the least funded by the state. Between them, they ran the 1,600 metres faster than anyone else in Asia.

The women's kabaddi squad that won gold was filled with young women from Himachal's hill villages, alongside Maharashtra's Sonali Shingate. In the men's gold medal team, Aslam Inamdar raided beside boys from Haryana's akharas.

The skeet bronze went to Mairaj Ahmad Khan of Khurja, Anantjeet Singh Naruka and Bhavtegh Singh Gill: a Muslim, a Rajput and a Sikh sharing a podium and, one assumes, a cartridge budget.

Harmanpreet from Moga, Richa Ghosh from Siliguri, Kranti Gaud from a village in Bundelkhand, Shree Charani from Kadapa and Radha Yadav, whose father sold vegetables in Mumbai, won the cricket gold. Back in Moga, Harmanpreet's father urged families to support their daughters.

The podium also held children of privilege: squash players from Delhi, table tennis players from Pune and Vadodara, trap and skeet shooters from families who can afford the guns. And this is the story. They all did it despite the people who run Indian sport, not because of them. Our federations have long been treated as fiefdoms, passed between politicians and their relatives like ancestral land.

In 2023, the country's most decorated wrestlers accused their federation chief of sexual harassment and camped at Jantar Mantar for weeks. They were detained, with their protest site dismantled, on the day the new parliament was inaugurated, while the man they had accused attended the ceremony inside.

The Indian Olympic Association spent much of the following year at war with itself. Athletes still speak of selection trials that feel like lotteries, of officials outnumbering competitors on foreign trips, and coaches who treat a young woman's ambition as a discipline problem. This is why the women's golds this fortnight feel more like verdicts.

When Neeru Dhanda won trap gold, messages came from President Murmu, UP CM Adityanath and others. Many who tweet within the hour, or arrive with a garland at the airport have spent years ensuring the federations stay in friendly hands.

Who supports India's sporting champions?

Who has filled the gap? Partly families, and partly a corporate sector that has quietly become Indian sport's scaffolding.

Tata Steel was running an archery academy in Jamshedpur and hockey academies in the east long before sports corporate social responsibility (CSR) was a line in anyone's annual report. Infosys Foundation partnered with the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy in 2019, the academy that shaped Lakshya Sen, who took a team bronze here.

In 2023, it committed Rs 30 crore with GoSports Foundation to a Girls for Gold programme for women athletes aged 13 to 19. It has since widened into Gear for Gold, backing the Mary Kom Regional Boxing Foundation, Lakshya Shooting Club and now the Usha School of Athletics.

Add JSW's Inspire Institute of Sport in Ballari and Olympic Gold Quest, all enabled by a CSR law that lists sport among permissible spending.

The caveats of corporate patronage

I should say the uncomfortable part too. Corporate money fills gaps the state leaves and the state then takes the credit.

It gravitates to sports that photograph well and to athletes already visible. It also buys goodwill cheaply. A logo on a medallist's tracksuit does more for a corporate reputation than any advertisement, and a sports academy reads far better in an annual report than a mine, a land acquisition or an emissions figure.

Corporate cannot replace a playing field in every government school, but in a system where the official machinery so often gets in the way, these academies have been a place where an athlete is measured by her timings rather than her surname.

Joy triumphs division

Sport belongs in those few arenas where India still cheers first and checks names later, or never.

When Salman and Satnam crossed the line, nobody on a sofa in Lucknow or Ludhiana paused to ask whose god each man thanked. When Aslam Inamdar completed a raid, the roar in Pune was not a census. Division needs time to organise but I would say that joy is faster. That is why the spontaneous celebrations of the last fortnight have felt so clean because nobody has yet had the chance to inject anything into them.

Sunoor Verma is a former cardiothoracic surgeon and global health practitioner who has advised UNHCR, WHO, UNICEF, and UN Women across four continents. He is Director of Partnerships and Advocacy at WISH, Qatar Foundation and writes in a personal capacity.

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