The Year Ahead: Eyes on the scoreboard

If 2025 was about India’s sporting ecosystem stepping up, 2026 will be all about follow-through. There can be no letting up, for a nation with sporting ambitions as lofty as ours. No longer can we have a good year followed by a couple of middling ones.

What does this mean for the months ahead?

First, the events. After a vetting process that stretched through most of 2025, India finally won, in November, its bid to bring the 2030 Commonwealth Games (CWG) to its shores. Ahmedabad has been named host city for the centenary edition of the event.

This, after a break of two decades (the last edition held here was in 2010, in New Delhi), marks a return for India, to hosting large-scale multi-sport events. As Union sports minister Mansukh Mandaviya put it, this successful pitch could “further boost our bid to host the 2036 Olympic Games”. Mandaviya has also expressed an ambitious larger goal of India being among the top ten sporting nations in the world, in the next 10 years.

In order for the country to work its way towards that goal, efforts will have to intensify and continue uninterrupted, and results will have to begin to show now, as a critical 2026 unfolds, with CWG in Glasgow and the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, all leading up of course to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

CWG arrives first, in July-August, amid troubles that hint to the kinds of hurdles India will need to navigate, ahead of the 2030 edition. For some time, the future of these Games has seemed uncertain. The city of Victoria in Australia, the original hosts of the 2026 edition, for instance, pulled out citing escalating costs. Glasgow was a late replacement, and will present a trimmed programme with fewer events than the previous edition in Birmingham, in 2022.

Several of the sports India dominates in have been axed in the scaled-down version, including wrestling (in which India won 12 medals at CWG 2022), badminton (6), table tennis (7), hockey (2), squash (2) and cricket (1).

Thus, a linear statistical comparison of Glasgow with Birmingham will be futile. Last time around, India was fourth in the medals table, with 61 medals.

This time, the spotlight will remain on India’s contingents in athletics (India won 8 medals in 2022), boxing (7), weightlifting (10) and sports that represent considerable potential for the country, such as swimming, judo, gymnastics and lawn bowls. That last one stood out in Birmingham. The Indian women’s fours team won the country’s first-ever CWG medal, a gold that was then accompanied by the men’s fours silver. How the country has tapped into and developed elite talent in this non-mainstream sport in the four intervening years could be an interesting test of sustainability for such efforts.

Far bigger, and certainly more critical, indicators for sport in India overall will come from the Asian Games to be held just after, in September-October. The previous edition, in Hangzhou in 2023, turned out to be a historic chapter for India. Pre-Games statements such as “Ab ki baar, 100 paar (This time, we will cross 100)” had seemed like marketing rhetoric, until the Indian contingent delivered 100 medals and more.

2023 proved to be the country’s best-ever outing at the multi-sport continental championships. In the wake of that haul of 106 medals, the challenge will be to keep the momentum going, three years on.

Overall, for India to raise its stature in world sport and within the Olympic movement, the country will need to first consistently establish itself at the Asia level. If India’s fourth-place position in the Asian Games medals tally in 2023 — behind China, Japan and South Korea — can be said to have set the tone, we would need to at least maintain, if not improve on it, this year.

Almost half of India’s 106 medals in Hangzhou came in shooting and athletics. What then added to the rush was India making its presence felt in sports such as badminton, archery (recurve), wrestling and table tennis, which have traditionally been dominated by the Asian powerhouses of China, South Korea and Japan.

It is in such sports, as well as in relatively niche ones such as rowing, sailing and golf, that the country’s developmental arc will be challenged.

What it comes down to, of course, is each individual contender being nurtured, and finding ways to raise their game. This year will provide at least some key insight into where some of India’s star athletes are headed.

Two-time Olympic medallist Neeraj Chopra finally broke the 90m threshold with his javelin in 2025, but it came at the cost of his jaw-dropping consistency of podium finishes in major events. The defending Asian Games champion, who missed the 2022 CWG due to injury, finished eighth at the World Championships in a 2025 season in which he did not appear to be at his physical best. It would be interesting to see whether Chopra can regain his incredible consistency in throws and medals both.

PV Sindhu, another two-time Olympic medallist, has also battled physical troubles in a largely quiet 2025. The badminton ace showed periodic sparks of her old self in a few tournaments, but did not go beyond the quarter-finals in any, and ended her season in October due to a foot injury. 2026 could be the year that determines how much further she can march.

Also making a return will be wrestler Vinesh Phogat, who had said she was ready to retire after the rollercoaster 2024 Paris Olympics, in which she was disqualified by weight, a step away from gold. The 31-year-old has now indicated that she will fight on, with LA 2028 as the larger goal.

Those Games, of course, will loom large, for athletes, sports administrators and coaches. The race to LA, after all, has already begun.