A nation of sporting moments, not yet a sporting culture

India's athletes from non-cricket disciplines, including badminton and chess, face financial struggles and lack of recognition despite years of global success and achievements.

For years, India has celebrated sport in flashes. An Olympic medal here, a historic world title there, a stirring anthem at a distant arena that briefly unites millions.

Then, almost as quickly, the applause fades.

The spotlight swings back to cricket, the headlines return to IPL auctions and sponsorship battles, and athletes from other disciplines quietly resume their struggle for recognition, respect and often, basic financial security.

That uneasy truth surfaced again recently.

India's star badminton pair Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty spoke with visible disappointment about how the country does not celebrate badminton achievements enough despite years of global success.

Soon after, veteran chess Grandmaster Abhijit Gupta revealed that an organiser delayed his prize money payment and that even the national federation was initially slow to intervene.

In January this year during the badminton nationals in Greater Noida, players were forced to sleep on floors since the fee was not paid the by federation to the hostel.

Even during the domestic wrestling event, the arrangements were not as they should be in Gonda.

These are different stories from different sports. Yet the same emotion runs through all. The feeling that Indian sport still values athletes selectively.

These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a larger sporting culture that still treats non-cricket athletes as temporary heroes instead of permanent national assets.

To be fair, India has made undeniable progress. Government-backed schemes such as the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS), the Target Asian Games Group (TAGG) and the ACTC Funds have transformed athlete preparation.

Elite athletes today travel with physiotherapists, nutritionists, psychologists and foreign coaches, support systems that barely existed a decade ago.

But funding excellence at the top is only one layer of sporting development. The real crisis lies beneath it.

A sporting superpower is not built only by financing a handful of elite athletes.

It is built by creating an ecosystem where athletes from every discipline are identifed, supported, and valued long before they become champions and long after they stop winning medals.

India still lacks that ecosystem.

Why China and USA excel at Olympics is because there is a system that positively influences the sport and athletes. This is despite the fact that the two major sporting superpowers have conflicting attitude, yet the ambition and purpose is no different.

In China, Ye Shiwen, the 2012 Olympic champion in 400m, was trained in swimming because her hands and feet were disproportionately large compared to her height. She was taken into the state-sponsored system and groomed. There is a system that creates champions.

China thrives on discipline, and repetition of technique.

In USA, it's a well crafted system that aims at gradual progress. From small leagues to school leagues to getting sponsorships to moving to College and then the national governing bodies of respective sports deal with the promising athlete.

In India, the obsession with just cricket is not difficult to understand. Cricket mastered television early, built icons across generations and became commercially irresistible.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) turned cricketers into year-round celebrities and converted sport into entertainment on a scale no other Indian federation could match.

Cricket became India's dominant sport because it built an ecosystem that no other sport managed to create. A middle-class Indian parent can now imagine a stable life through cricket.

Most Olympic sports still cannot offer that certainty.

Other sports never received that level of sustained storytelling or investment.

A badminton player may win a Super 1000 title, a wrestler may become world champion, a chess player may beat elite grandmasters, but outside major tournaments they disappear from mainstream conversation.

Many federations remain poorly marketed, fragmented by politics or unable to build fan engagement. Many are embroiled in litigation and temporarily run by court-appointed ad-hoc panels.

Corporate India, too, still views most Olympic sports as charity rather than long-term investment opportunities.

That gap in visibility creates another damaging cycle: less attention means fewer sponsors, fewer sponsors mean less financial security.

Families do not trust the system enough to risk their children's futures on sport. And honestly, the system has given them reasons not to.

Official apathy has been normalised for decades.

Recently this correspondent was asked by an elite athlete if competing in a specific wrestling tournament will help get job? Well, what is ambition to enter sport? To get job or to excel as an athlete?.

No sporting revolution can happen in such an atmosphere.

If India genuinely wants to become a sporting superpower, the country needs a cultural shift, not just bigger budgets.

If money alone could create champions, then factor in the investment the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) makes. LTA, reportedly, has an annual budget of 157 million pound and yet they do not have a serious Grand Slam contender as yet.

Andy Murray and Fred Perry are the only players to have won Wimbledon, their own major event.

LTA spent just over 36 million pound (approx 462 crore) for the conduct of grass-court tournaments, a group stage of the Davis Cup Finals and the Billie Jean King Cup Finals in Glasgow in 2022.

Can India match that as of today and do it consistently?.

So we must not think that putting in a few hundred crores on a few athletes will guarantee India Olympic success.

If India genuinely wants to become a sporting superpower in the next few years, the mission must go far beyond medal projections for the Olympic Games or Olympic Games.

First, India needs sporting literacy. Schools must stop treating sports as extracurricular distractions. Physical education should become as serious as mathematics or science.

A nation of 1.4 billion still loses countless athletes because parents see sport as an unstable career with uncertain returns.

Second, India needs stronger grassroots competitions. Most athletes still struggle to find high-quality domestic tournaments. Without competitive depth at the junior and university level, elite success becomes dependent on rare individual brilliance instead of a production line of talent.

Third, federations must become professional and accountable.

A player preparing for international competition should never have to publicly fight for dues or basic clarity.

Fourth, India needs better sporting media culture. Coverage cannot revolve only around medals. Fans connect with journeys, rivalries, personalities and narratives.

Countries that dominate global sport create heroes before podium finishes, not after them.

Finally, India must build respect for athletes beyond cricket.

Admiration should not depend solely on commercial value. A chess grandmaster, a boxer, an archer or a wrestler carries the same national flag onto the world stage.

The encouraging part is that India is no longer asking whether it can compete globally. That barrier has already been broken across badminton, wrestling, boxing, athletics, shooting, chess and hockey.

Becoming a sporting superpower is not just about winning more medals.

It is about creating a nation where athletes never have to ask if their achievements matter. A sporting nation is not one that watches just the finals. It is one that respects preparation.

It respects athletes who finish fourth. It supports players recovering from injury. It values domestic champions.

The painful irony is that India today possesses perhaps its greatest generation of multi-sport athletes ever. From badminton courts to chess boards, from javelin runways to boxing rings, Indian athletes are competing globally with unprecedented confidence.

But many still feel unseen at home.

The true measure of a sporting superpower is not how loudly it celebrates champions after victory.

It is whether its athletes ever feel abandoned before it.