India experienced host nation bump after 2010 Commonwealth Games. Can 2030 do the same for Indian athletics, swimming, gymnastics and cycling?

Its impact was seen by the time the Games ended — shooters won 30 out of the 101 medals India won, the most in a single edition of the CWG. Two years later, at the London Olympics, two Indian shooters — Gagan Narang and Vijay Kumar — reached the podium.

Shooting wasn’t the only sport that experienced the ‘host nation bump’; wrestlers, shuttlers and boxers all witnessed a short-term uptick.

As India prepares to host the CWG again, in 2030 in Ahmedabad, Bindra wonders if these sports will feel the same impact as 20 years ago.

“We live in a different era now, so that boost may not be the same because most sports and elite athletes are well taken care of now,” he tells The Indian Express.

The real opportunity, he adds, “lies in how we use the 2030 Commonwealth Games to further bolster grassroots development and push for development in sports where we have yet not made a real dent.”

For India, this can be one way to find purpose by hosting the Games that practically no one else in the Commonwealth wants.

Focus on high-medal disciplines

Since the turn of the century, India has not sent athletes in almost half of the sports that feature at the Olympics. At the Sydney Games, the country was represented in just 13 out of the 28 sports. In Paris, India’s athletes qualified in 16 out of 32 sports.

Between them, athletics, swimming, cycling, gymnastics, wrestling and canoeing accounted for almost 150 gold medals at the Paris Olympics, out of the total 339 on offer. The top Olympic nations – like the US, China and Russia when they were allowed – have largely concentrated on these sports for a major chunk of their medals.

Of the six, India can only claim to be a serious player in wrestling and has a negligible presence in the other five. Neeraj Chopra’s gold in Tokyo and silver in Paris, and Dipa Karmakar’s fourth place in Rio 2016 are exceptions in athletics and gymnastics. In cycling, no Indian has qualified for the Olympics since 1964 and swimmers have struggled to meet the ‘A’ qualification mark in every cycle.

Former Athletics Federation of India president Adille Sumariwalla says a high level of competition in these sports — except wrestling — at the Commonwealth level gives India a chance to seriously invest in them.

“We are not Olympic or world-class, we have to reach there. And to reach there, you need various platforms like the Asian Games, the Commonwealth Games, and you build on those platforms,” Sumariwalla says. “For certain events, the CWG may be very easy because the standard is not great. But, you would say the main events like track and field, swimming, cycling are very tough and will put our athletes to the test.”

2010, a missed opportunity for some

While they may have been controversial from an organisational point of view, the 2010 CWG were a sporting success as far as India is concerned. Not just because of the medal bump, but those Games were also the first time an entire generation of athletes competed on home soil and many of them went on to become household names.

The true potential of women athletes, too, came to the fore — be it Geeta Phogat with her wrestling gold, Krishna Poonia winning the discus title or Saina Nehwal propelling India to a historic second place in the overall medal tally.

But while India bolstered its reputation in some disciplines, the key medal-heavy sports did not get enough attention. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s report into the Games pointed out some of the shortcomings. Consider these:

While India was awarded the Games in 2003, the core probables for cycling were selected only in July 2009, barely a year before the CWG, giving them very little time to prepare.

In gymnastics, equipment procured at a cost of Rs 1.39 crore could not be installed at the training facility. The CAG report had photos of the unpacked items lying at the Sports Authority of India centre in Kolkata.

Until a couple of years before the Games, in 2008-09, the swimmers had a national camp that lasted for just 32 days whereas the cyclists did not have a training camp even for a single day.

After many delays and the inability of the Sports Authority of India (SAI) to procure cycles in time, they were finally purchased and handed over to the cyclists by the Indian Olympic Association on September 18, 2010, when ‘only four days were remaining for the closure of the training camp’, according to the CAG report.

Ahmedabad 2030 could be an opportunity to learn from the 2010 Games and put renewed attention on the disciplines where India isn’t strong, but which offer a high number of medals at the Olympics.

“Can we really put together a well-thought-out developmental program with 2030 in mind, but also looking beyond 2030 and use the Games as the point which kind of bolsters development in these sports?” Bindra asks. “Because in other sports, like shooting, what more can you do?”