Why CWG is relevant for India
In July 2019, a long time before India’s first chapter of the XXII Commonwealth Games (CWG) would be written, the build-up began with an unusually audacious foreword by the then Indian Olympic Association (IOA) chief: a boycott proposal.
Riled by the exclusion of shooting—the happiest hunting sport for India at the CWG—from the 2022 Birmingham Games programme, Narinder Batra outlined the need to “start taking tough positions” in a letter to the then sports minister. Months later, that warning shot fired by the former IOA chief—who also, by the way, went on to question the standard of the CWG—would eventually be doused.
Three years later, here we are: from triggering a withdrawal threat to dispatching a strong 200-plus Indian athletes’ contingent to Birmingham for the 2022 edition of the CWG. Strong—minus the strongest medal hope and the starring face of India’s athletics renaissance, Neeraj Chopra, who pulled out injured less than 72 hours before he was to carry the tri-colour at the opening ceremony on Thursday.
Massive participation
The big-picture relevance of the CWG itself, which will see more than 4,500 athletes from 54 countries and 18 territories from the Commonwealth of Nations in Birmingham, in the modern sporting landscape could be a point of long-winding discussion in coffee table conversations and boardroom meetings.
However, for a country caught somewhere between basking in the glory of the seven-medal Tokyo Olympics last year and yearning to break free from its single-digit rut at the 2024 Paris Games, that could well be put aside. For its athletes resetting their Olympic cycle clocks with a year-long postponement of the Asian Games, the CWG takes centrestage now.
For Bajrang Punia to find his mojo again, the CWG is relevant. For Amit Panghal and Vinesh Phogat to wear a smile and perhaps a medal and erase the Tokyo trauma, it’s relevant. For the paddlers to do the talking on the table after the tiffs in courts of law, it’s relevant. For the squash stars to continue yearning for medals in their pinnacle of multi-sporting events, it’s relevant. For the hockey teams to keep the Olympics impetus going, it’s relevant.
For the larger Indian Olympic fraternity to re-evaluate looking ahead to 2024 Paris in the shorter-than-usual Games cycle, this CWG is relevant.
Olympic preparations
“The CWG and Asian Games are stepping stones towards preparations for the Olympics. More so this time, where there is one major multi-nation event every year before the 2024 Games,” said Viren Rasquinha, former India hockey captain and CEO of Olympic Gold Quest who is also part of the Mission Olympic Cell. “A lot of people feel that in some sports the competition is fairly weak for India at the CWG. But it’s one thing to be expected to win a medal, and quite another to go there and actually win it with a performance you expect from yourself.”
That holds true for wrestling (it contributed 12 of India’s 66 medals in 2018) and weightlifting (9)—the two sports apart from shooting that have given India 100-plus medals in CWG history—and to a large extent boxing (9) and badminton (6). In each of these sports missing a rich Asian or American flavour, Indians are expected to grab home a wholesale quantity of medals again. And while the been-there-done-that faces—PV Sindhu, Mirabai Chanu, Bajrang and their ilk—will splash across social media and television sets, the CWG brings with it a platform for the more obscure ones to find a place at the forefront for a change. And so over the next 10 days if you happen to hear the names of Jeremy Lalrinnunga, Achinta Sheuli (both weightlifting), Sumit Kundu, Nitu Ghanghas (both boxing), Aakarshi Kashyap (badminton), to name a few from the watch-out-for section, be hardly surprised.
“An example from the 2018 CWG was table tennis and Manika Batra,” Rasquinha said of the breakthrough singles champion who spearheaded Indian table tennis’ dizzyingly high eightmedal Gold Coast outing with medals in each of her four events. “There are so many newcomers in these sports and for them, it’s a fantastic opportunity to make a name for themselves, or for sports which otherwise do not get too much attention.”
Hype around athletics
Athletics sure has got plenty of late in the country. However, with its Olympic champion poster boy on an intermission, the support cast will have to step up for box office success gauged by podium finishes and personal bests in this movie. The presence of athletes from the Caribbean islands like Jamaica and African nations like Kenya in the CWG does present a much stiffer challenge for Indians on the track and field, but not every event comprises the highest quality lineup. The blockbuster bridge, as such, isn’t all too far for the headline-making jumpers of the season and the flying-under-theNeeraj-radar javelin throwers of the country.
Like athletics, hockey would do well to continue elevating its upward arc after the Olympics curveball. India finished fourth across gender in hockey in Gold Coast, and from toying with the idea of not sending a team to gathering a second-string men’s team to naming its best possible squads, a medal-less campaign again wouldn’t exactly be a happy image in Birmingham to go with the Tokyo backdrop.
Speaking of images, there will unquestionably be plenty more picture-perfect endings and medal poses from the Indians in a multi-nation and -sport event this July-August compared to the last. And oh, there’s some T20 cricket too, the women padding up for the first time for the sport at the CWG.
More reason to give the CWG a watch, perhaps?