Every multi-sport event gives India the same flattering illusion: that we are a nation of devoted sports lovers. For two weeks, people who could not have named a race walker on Monday become furious experts in judging criteria by Friday. Medal graphics bloom across social media, ministers post congratulations, and broadcasters discover the phrase “historic campaign.” Then the flame goes out and cricket resumes its natural function as weather, wallpaper and national operating system.
I enjoy the enthusiasm. I do not enjoy the amnesia.
The Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games are not a side dish to whichever cricket series happens to occupy the same calendar. The official Aichi-Nagoya 2026 site shows the sheer range of disciplines and schedules involved. That range is the story: Indian athletes have arrived through radically different sporting economies, some supported by professional systems and others by families, employers, federations and stubbornness held together with tape.
My argument is not the familiar plea to “celebrate all sports.” Celebration is cheap. I want attention to behave like infrastructure. I want editors, sponsors and administrators to stay interested when there is no medal photo available.
A medal is the end of a long sentence
We usually encounter a non-cricket athlete at the punctuation mark. The medal arrives, and suddenly a life is compressed into a heroic montage: modest beginnings, sacrifice, national flag, swelling music. What disappears is the grammar—the coaching changes, competition access, recovery support, equipment costs, selection uncertainty and months spent travelling without anyone asking how the athlete is doing.
This is why medal-count discourse irritates me even when India is winning. A tally is a useful record, not an explanation. It tells us where athletes finished. It does not tell us whether the system that produced them is broad, stable or fair. One exceptional athlete can disguise a weak pipeline just as one failed campaign can obscure years of competent work. Yet we immediately convert every result into a verdict on “Indian sport,” as though archery, weightlifting, athletics, kabaddi and badminton share one administrative bloodstream.
They do not. Anyone browsing the continuing coverage at Sportstar can see how many distinct competitions and athlete stories coexist under that lazy umbrella. The least we can do is discuss each sport on its own terms. A wrestling defeat is not automatically evidence of weak mentality. A fourth-place finish is not a moral failure. A gold medal does not prove that the federation behind it has become competent.
I also reject the consoling claim that audiences simply demand cricket and media companies merely obey. Demand is cultivated. Cricket is available before breakfast, analysed through lunch and repackaged by dinner. Its domestic players become familiar faces before many non-cricket champions receive a proper interview. If you give one sport year-round storytelling and another ninety seconds every four years, you cannot later point to audience familiarity as a law of nature.
Stop making athletes audition for basic curiosity
What would better attention look like? Not compulsory reverence, certainly. Athletes do not need protection from criticism. They need informed criticism: discussion of tactics, selection and performance that assumes their sport is worth learning. The quickest way to patronise a champion is to ask only about sacrifice and patriotism while ignoring technique.
Broadcasters should commit to regular windows for national championships and international circuits, with commentary that teaches without condescending. Newsrooms should retain beat knowledge rather than parachuting generalists into medal events. Sponsors should build campaigns around seasons and rivalries, not merely the face that happened to trend after a final. Federations, for their part, must make schedules, results and selection policies easy to find. Visibility cannot depend entirely on athletes becoming their own exhausted social-media departments.
And cricket’s administrators should resist treating every open date as territory to occupy. I like cricket. I know its rhythms, its pleasures and its astonishing hold on this country. But abundance has become entitlement. When a bilateral match and an Asian Games final compete for attention, the scheduling problem is not proof that other sports are unmarketable; it is proof that nobody with power felt obliged to protect their space.
Fans have responsibilities too. We cannot complain about inadequate coverage while refusing to watch anything that lacks a familiar celebrity. Pick one sport and follow it beyond the Games. Learn when its national championships happen. Watch an athlete lose before demanding that she win for you. Curiosity is not charity; it is the beginning of sporting literacy.
What strikes me at every Asian Games is not that India suddenly becomes a multi-sport nation. It is that the country briefly sees the multi-sport nation that already exists. The runners, shooters, paddlers, lifters, wrestlers, archers and players were here before the opening ceremony. They will still be training after the closing montage has been replaced by a cricket promo.
I do not want them to earn our attention again at the next medal ceremony. The medal is theirs. The attention is our test.
