Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
India finished the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games with 85 medals, 21 gold, 27 silver and 37 bronze, to finish fourth in the continental standings. It was India’s second-best medal haul at the Asian Games, behind the 107 medals at Hangzhou. But the 22-medal drop from the previous edition, and seven fewer golds, means there is plenty to examine beyond the headline number.
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The campaign also offered a more complicated picture of Indian sport. India sent a deliberately young contingent, produced 83 debutant medallists and won medals in 20 sports. At the same time, it exposed a gold-medal conversion problem, large participation gaps, questions around talent identification and significant differences in how India’s sports programmes are delivering.
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A senior Sports Ministry official offered a clear defence of that approach: qualification standards should remain stringent, but federations must do more to build athletes capable of meeting them.
The 85 medals are a substantial achievement. They also offer a useful report card on where Indian sport stands.
1. DID INDIA GET THE YOUTH GAMBLE RIGHT?
The clearest experiment before Aichi-Nagoya was India’s decision to go younger. Of the 501 athletes, 310 were Asian Games debutants, nearly 62 per cent of the contingent. Of those debutants, 83 won medals, meaning 26.8 per cent of the first-time contingent finished on the podium.
The Sports Ministry had made the long-term objective clear before the Games.
“Young blood is coming in. They are inexperienced, but it’s a good sign for the future. I am not speculating anything about medals, but I am sure our strength will be built over the next four and eight years.”
The numbers from Aichi-Nagoya provide some validation. The experiment did not merely increase the number of young athletes in the contingent. It produced podium finishes.
But this was not a case of lowering the bar for young athletes.
For measurable individual events, an athlete had to match or better the sixth-place performance from the previous Asian Games at a recognised competition in the preceding 12 months. For non-measurable events, the benchmarks generally included a top-six finish at the Senior Asian Championships or a ranking among the top six Asian athletes. Team sports had separate criteria.
A senior Sports Ministry official stressed that the intention was never to simply cut the size of the contingent.
“The intention was to send people of a certain quality, not just people going because an event exists,” the official said.
There were still specific points of contention. Tennis became a selection issue, with questions raised over the criteria and eventual composition of the team. Shooting went through trials that left out established names, including Sarabjot Singh, the Paris 2024 mixed 10m air pistol bronze medallist with Manu Bhaker.
There was, however, evidence that the higher threshold did not result in large numbers of athletes being eliminated immediately. The ministry pointed to 25 fourth-place finishes and another 25 to 40 quarter-finalists, while noting that first-round exits were relatively few.
The bigger question now is harder.
Of the 83 debutant medallists, how many can be converted into consistent Asian Games and Olympic medal winners?
The youth gamble has produced a pool. India now has to make sure that pool does not peak at one Games.
2: DID THE BIG GUNS FIRE?
Some of the strongest evidence comes from India’s established elite.
Shooting, athletics, badminton, boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, archery and table tennis are among the sports in the TOPS Core group. Together, they produced 63 of India’s 85 medals and 14 of its 21 golds.
But even within that group, the returns were sharply different.
Archery was the standout. Nine medals, including five golds, represents an exceptional conversion rate. It also produced two of India’s biggest golds, in the women’s individual recurve and women’s team events, breaching a Korean stronghold with the help of 17-year-old Kumkum Mohod.
Boxing also produced six medals, with three golds. Wrestling won six, including two golds.
Shooting had India’s second-highest sport-wise medal haul with 15 medals, but only three were gold. It had eight silvers and four bronzes. The pistol team, which is considered India’s best, underperformed.
Athletics presents the opposite problem. It was India’s biggest medal-producing sport with 24 medals, but just one was gold. Nine were silver and 14 bronze.
That makes athletics the clearest example of India’s growing depth not yet translating into dominance.
Badminton, meanwhile, returned just one bronze despite being one of India’s most established high-performance programmes. Weightlifting had one silver, while table tennis also returned a solitary bronze, raising questions about succession in both programmes.
For weightlifting, the biggest concern is what comes after Mirabai Chanu. Despite India’s eight-medal haul in weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games, the sport produced just one medal at the Asian Games. More worryingly, India had no male weightlifter competing in Aichi-Nagoya. The lack of depth beyond Chanu is a concern that Indian weightlifting will have to address sooner rather than later.
The broader tally tells the same story.
India’s 64 silver and bronze medals show a much wider podium base. But only 21 of the 85 medals were gold.
At Hangzhou, India won 107 medals, including 28 golds, 38 silvers and 41 bronzes.
The difference was 22 fewer medals overall, seven fewer golds, 11 fewer silvers and four fewer bronzes.
Shooting dropped from 22 medals and seven golds at Hangzhou to 15 medals and three golds. Archery, by contrast, showed what better conversion can look like.
India has become better at producing medallists.
The next challenge is turning more of those medallists into champions.
3: WHAT DID GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT PRODUCE?
The government’s Asian Games preparation expenditure through the Annual Calendar for Training and Competition stood at around Rs 702.8 crore across 30 disciplines.
The sport-wise allocation throws up significant contrasts.
The numbers cannot be reduced to a simple cost-per-medal ranking. Hockey requires a fundamentally different investment structure from an individual sport such as archery. Infrastructure, team size, number of events and international competition all affect expenditure.
But the differences are large enough to demand scrutiny.
Archery received around Rs 22.2 crore and returned nine medals, including five golds. Kabaddi received Rs 4.3 crore and won two golds.
Athletics received nearly Rs 55 crore and produced India’s largest sport-wise haul, but just one gold. Shooting received almost Rs 80 crore and produced 15 medals, including three golds.
Then there is badminton. Almost Rs 50 crore was spent on the discipline, which returned one bronze.
The question is not simply whether India needs to spend more. It is what the money is buying: competition exposure, equipment, coaching, sports science, foreign expertise, domestic infrastructure or simply participation.
The strongest programmes need to be studied not only for the medals they produce, but for how they create athletes capable of repeatedly winning them.
4: IS THE SYSTEM IDENTIFYING TALENTS EARLY?
To understand the numbers, it is important to understand how India’s targeted athlete-identification system works.
At the top is TOPS Core, which is aimed at established elite athletes with proven international credentials and medal potential.
Below that is TOPS Development, for athletes who are progressing towards the elite level but are not yet established at Core level.
Then comes TAGG, or the Target Asian Games Group, which identifies athletes being developed specifically with the Asian Games cycle in mind.
The fourth layer is the Khelo India pathway. Athletes who emerge through Khelo India Games and other grassroots competitions can be identified and supported as they move towards the higher levels.
These targeted pathways operate alongside support provided directly to National Sports Federations. An athlete does not have to be part of Core, Development, TAGG or the Khelo India pathway to receive support through a federation. The Sports Ministry says federations are funded for camps, exposure, equipment, coaching and other requirements, while TOPS provides additional, personalised support where required.
That distinction matters when looking at India’s Aichi-Nagoya medallists.
Once team, relay, doubles and mixed-team medals are removed, India had 43 unique individual medallists.
The point is not simply how many medallists were already in TOPS. It is whether the system is identifying athletes early enough and creating a pathway for them to move from grassroots discovery to Asian Games-level performance.
WHERE DID THE GOLD MEDALS COME FROM?
The gold-medal picture is particularly revealing.
India had eight individual Asian Games champions: Lovlina Borgohain, Parveen Hooda, Ankush Panghal, Sujeet Kalkal, Kumkum Mohod, Pranavi Urs, Aman Sehrawat and Neeru Dhanda.
Lovlina, Sujeet and Aman were in TOPS Core. Parveen, Ankush and Neeru were in TOPS Development. Pranavi Urs was part of TAGG. Kumkum was outside these three targeted groups.
Kumkum is therefore the clearest example of a champion emerging outside the three upper-level targeted pathways. The 17-year-old won individual recurve gold and finished the Games with three medals.
But the Sports Ministry’s response is that being outside TOPS does not mean being outside the support system.
In Kumkum’s case, the ministry says she received new equipment, a foreign coach and psychologist support and was part of the national camp environment.
“That is a kind of misnomer that Kumkum is not in TOPS so she’s not gone,” the senior official said.
TOPS is a targeted, additional layer of support. It is not the entire government sports ecosystem, the Ministry source said.
“TOPS is not a bus that will come at a station and everybody will jump onto it,” the source said.
“TOPS is supplemental, personalised support. Wherever the federation is good and its programme is effective, we are able to give everything to the top players through the federation itself, so there is very little left to top them up from TOPS.
““For archery, 99.9 per cent of the requirements were already being fulfilled through the federation route. We had given them the foreign coach, psychologists and Indian coaches, their camps were running all the time, and we were sending the entire team for all the events wherever the federation proposed. It is not one size fits all.”
But it still leaves an important question for the next cycle: how effectively is India identifying athletes before they become established medal prospects?
Kumkum’s breakthrough shows that talent can emerge outside the established pathways. India’s next task is to ensure that such athletes are identified, supported and moved through the system early enough, rather than becoming visible only after they have already reached the international podium.
PART 5: MORE SPORTS, MORE ATHLETES?
There is another limitation to India’s medal ambitions: the number of events in which it actually competes.
At the Khelo India Dialogue in August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described India’s limited participation across Olympic sports as a “bitter truth”, pointing out that India does not compete in a large number of medal events.
Aichi-Nagoya offered a smaller-scale reflection of that problem.
The Games had 469 medal events across 43 sports. India competed across 36 disciplines, but even within several sports, it entered only a fraction of the available events.
The gaps are particularly stark in swimming, judo, karate and taekwondo.
But this is where the government’s position on qualifications becomes important. The answer, it argues, is not to send athletes simply because a medal event exists.
Instead, federations need to create enough depth to produce athletes who can meet the existing qualification standards.
“Why are we funding them (NSFs) then? We are funding them. We are sending them for exposure. We are giving them camps. We are giving them everything for their technical requirements,” the Ministry source said.
“But, again, if our medal tally has to increase, even in athletics, there are 165 medals in athletics. How many have we won?
“Swimming has 165. How many have we won? Zero.”
The numbers illustrate the opportunity.
“If we start competing at that level in these sports, then we can cross 85 and go beyond,” the official said.
That is the other side of India’s selection debate. The qualification bar does not necessarily need to come down. The pool capable of clearing it needs to get bigger.
Aichi-Nagoya was therefore neither a failure nor a finished product.
It showed a wider base, but also a familiar problem at the top. It showed that investment can produce depth, but that returns vary dramatically between sports. It showed that TOPS is only one part of the high-performance ecosystem. And it showed that India cannot simply enter more events without first creating athletes capable of competing in them.
The next medal jump has two components: Win more of the events India already competes strongly in. And build athletes for the events it currently barely enters.
The 85-medal haul is not the end of the argument. India has raised the floor. The next task is to raise the ceiling.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
