gold The standard
In larger numbers and a wider range of disciplines — weightlifting and sailing, boxing, shooting, archery, badminton and more — India’s athletes are boosting the country’s chances in Tokyo. Meet the contingent keeping the dream alive
Meet the contingent keeping India's dream alive at the Tokyo Olympics. They're shining in weightlifting, sailing, boxing, shooting, archery, badminton and more
India may win a medal on Day One of the Tokyo Olympics, and that’s not preGames optimism talking. Consider the person in action on July 24. Early in the morning, India time, weightlifter Mirabai Chanu will attempt to win her first Olympic medal. With the usual caveat that an Olympic medal is won or lost on the day, Chanu’s chances are dazzlingly bright. She is the first Indian to win a world championship since Karnam Malleswari in 1995, with a gap of more than two decades between the two golds. Malleswari went on to become the first Indian woman to win a medal at the Olympics, with her bronze in 2000 in Sydney. But note the five-year gap between her best performance at the world’s and her Olympic medal. At the 1996 Atlanta Games, when Malleswari was at the peak of her powers, weightlifting was still a men-only affair at the Olympics.
Chanu will not have that disadvantage. She won her world title in 2017, and has been constantly improving since, bettering her own personal best (and the national record) twice in the last two years and setting a world mark in overall weight lifted this year.
She is also the World No. 1 in her weight class, which makes her the first Indian weightlifter to be world’s best going into an Olympics.
So it’s optimism backed by cold logic and hard facts. At no other time in India’s weary history at the Olympics have there been more Indians ranked within the global top 3 in their sports going into the Games. This is the first time we can hope for a spread of medals based on more than just emotion.
The boxer Amit Panghal is World No. 1 and the top seed for Tokyo, a first for an Indian boxer.
The wrestler Vinesh Phogat is World No. 1 and the top seed for Tokyo, a first for an Indian wrestler.
Bajrang Punia will go into the Olympics as the world’s topranked wrestler in his category, having dominated his field in Asia and won medals at the last two world championships.
Of the nine people in India’s shooting contingent, seven are ranked in the top 3 in their categories, two are World No. 1, and the pair of Saurabh Chaudhary and Manu Bhaker have won every World Cup gold except one since the new mixed pistol pair category was introduced in shooting in 2019.
In fact, India won more medals in the 2019 World Cup cycle than powerhouses such as Russia and China in shooting, an unprecedented feat (the 2020 cycle was sunk by the pandemic).
Archer Deepika Kumari will also go into the Olympics as the World No. 1, but because the Indian women’s recurve team failed to make the cut for Tokyo, her opportunity for a medal will be restricted to the individual event and the newly introduced mixed team, where she will pair up with husband Atanu Das. Going by the couple’s recent performances, a mixed team medal is a real possibility.
In track and field too, India has a rare chance at a medal. Neeraj Chopra’s Olympic preparations may have been blighted by a lack of competitions due to poor planning, but he has recorded the fourth-best throw in the world this season, breaking his own national record. He is a whisker away from a podium finish. What about the rest of the India contingent? PV Sindhu may have slipped from the top 3 world rankings, but she remains the defending world champion and having made the world championships final three years in a row now, it’s become clear just how gigantic her big-game temperament can be. It may help that her fiercest rival, Carolina Marin, who beat her to the Olympic gold in Rio, will not be in Tokyo, as a result of an ACL (knee) injury.
Beyond the obsessive quest for medals, there are also the wonderful sporting stories of transformation and of beating the odds.
Take Simranjit Kaur, a boxer from a village called Chakar near Ludhiana in Punjab, once infamous for drugs and violence, where a boxing gym began to effect deep social change. Kaur will be the first person from Chakar to compete at the Olympics; she is also the only Indian woman boxer who is seeded (4th) at Tokyo. (Speaking of women boxers, seeded or not, discount the legendary Mary Kom at your own peril.)
Nethra Kumanan, the first woman sailor from India to qualify for the Games, is set to hit the waves of Tokyo Bay. There are the lightning strikes of Bhavani Devi, the first Indian to qualify for a fencing event at the Olympics, rising out of nowhere in a country that has neither a culture nor the infrastructure for the sport.
Five years ago, India returned from Rio with just two medals. That was business as usual. Tokyo offers the first real chance to break that mould.