107.
An arbitrary number that will go down in Indian sporting history. For the first time in Asian Games history, India hit, then crossed, the 100-medal mark. 28 gold, 38 silver, 41 bronze. India is now just the fourth nation to cross three figures at the end of an Asiad. What began as a marketing campaign caught the public imagination and then became reality.
107 is an incredible number and the jump from Jakarta 2018 equally incredible: 70 medals to 107, up by exactly 52.85%.
But 107 is also a cold number; it doesn't show the magnitude of the achievement, the people behind that statistic, the stories behind those medals. They've come from all corners: the medals and the athletes covered almost of the nation, both geographically and demographically. The 'unity in diversity' line has rarely hit harder.
There were maiden golds in equestrian sports, where riders spend crores of rupees and all their life in training and bonding with their horses, and stunning golds in sports like steeplechase, whose greatest Indian exponent once served in Siachen. There was 62-year-old Raju Tolani winning bridge silver and 15-year-old Anahat Singh winning a couple of bronzes in squash. The ages of the bronze winning women's speed skating team read: 29, 17, 15, 15. There was 18-year-old Esha Singh winning 4 shooting medals on debut, there was 37-year-old Saurav Ghosal winning his eighth and ninth squash medal in his fifth Asiad.
There were dominant, lead-from-the-front wins in compound archery (where India won all five of the five golds on offer) and shooting (Sift Kaur Samra, annihilating the world record en-route 50m 3P gold) . There were incredibly gutsy come-from-behind wins like HS Prannoy in his badminton quarter and the Indian men's squash team in the final (against Pakistan, that too). Indian cricket debuted at the Games and did what Indian cricket is always expected to. There was Neeraj Chopra doing what Neeraj Chopra does, but with a surprise push. There were minor miracles like Sutirtha and Ayhika Mukherjee pulling off one of the great wins in Indian sporting history.
This is so good to see ❤️
(via revolve_around_sun/IG) pic.twitter.com/8CSxPT4xFY
- ESPN India (@ESPNIndia) October 7, 2023
Take all this into consideration, and India's medal haul is a great win, the stories of the past fortnight the reason we all - fans and journalists alike - invest so much of our life in sport.
However, it's also necessary to take a step back and see things from a slightly broader perspective.
China have won 194 GOLDS - that's just counting their gold medals - this Asiad, and they have more on the way over the next day and a half. They hit the 100-medal mark in the early morning hours of day three (India did so on Day 13).
The behemoth that is the Chinese sports system is what you get with focused, long-term, goal-oriented planning. There may be faults with it, but if your target is that medal tally, then they have set out the blueprint on how a large country of unimaginable numbers and with a varied demographic can do it.
Scale apart, there is another difference between India's success and China's. For Indian athletes, it's their win defeating systems, and of systems defeating circumstances.
The protagonists of the win deserve our plaudits; everything that makes it so difficult for them needs closer examination. You could construe it as finding negatives instead of celebrating the achievements, but it actually makes the 105 number look even more remarkable.
Take the compound archers. What Jyothi Vennam and Ojas Deotale and the rest have achieved is magnificent, unprecedented, but they shouldn't be allowed to fade away simply because their sport has no representation in Paris. This clean sweep didn't happen by accident. India has been slowly and steadily climbing their way to the top, one world championship at a time. Five of the six archers are in the world top 10, the one outside it is #19. These aren't Asia-level champs, but global, and yet they struggle for recognition and support. So what if it's not an Olympic sport? If the dream is to see India's flag fly high, few lift it taller than these unassuming super athletes.
Rowing returned from Hangzhou with 5 medals. Almost all the rowers learnt the sport only after joining the Indian armed forces. They're winning medals after learning as adults - imagine if they get access to the kind of focused training successful rowing nations afford to their athletes at a much younger age.
That wrestling returns with any medals at all (six, for the record) seems a miracle given the chaos and drama surrounding the federation, the selection trials and most importantly the moving-so-slow-it-may-just-be-dead court case against the man who held Indian wrestling in his fist for the past decade.
The 3x3 Basketball players wowed crowds and won hearts (if not medals) but they will come back to news that their federation will not allow India players to play in the only (newly set-up) national league around. There are athletes, like the men's 5x5 basketball team, who didn't even travel to Hangzhou because the sports ministry decided to not let them.
Where the kabaddi men were expected to win gold, the superstars India sees evening-after-evening in the Pro Kabaddi League, no one even knew who the women's kabaddi team were. They won a stunning gold, and now we'll see them next in Nagoya 2026.
India got medals from sports that most people don't even realise exist (either in life or in the Asiad specifically): Sepaktakraw and wushu sound like fantasy games and yet an ecosystem exists in the shadows, its numbers small, like family, its medallists winners against all odds.
And speaking the wushu family, spare a thought for three members of the squad who didn't even make it to China. Nyeman Wangsu, Onilu Tega and Mepung Lamgu remained in India despite being cleared to play by everyone who was supposed to let them. The reason: They are from Arunachal Pradesh.
INDIA HAVE DONE IT! pic.twitter.com/f2SfZTG1xG
- ESPN India (@ESPNIndia) October 6, 2023
What could have been a major diplomatic incident (China not issuing regular visas to Indian citizens from Arunachal Pradesh) was responded to by vociferous protests for a day, and the union sports minister boycotting the Games opening ceremony and... that's it. As the Games wore on and the medals flowed in, they were forgotten. In a nation of nearly a billion and half, attention spans are not built to last that long.
So, as we celebrate the six hundred and fifty-two athletes who went, as we bask in the reflected glory of the one hundred and seven medals these athletes combined to win... let us also shine a spotlight on everything that remains hidden in the shadows. On the forgotten three; on the systems that don't work, and the circumstances that don't allow the systems-that-do to function at capacity; on the superstars who go through the grind day-in and day-out dreaming of wearing India on their chest and a medal on their necks.
107. Brilliant. But this must only be the start.