At the Hangzhou Asian Games in 2023, India scripted its best-ever show — 106 medals, with 28 golds and a lot of chatter about the arrival of a sporting nation. Three years hence, India capped off the Aichi-Nagoya edition with 85 medals — their second-best performance at the Asiad — comprising 21 golds. Of the 28 golds India defended in Japan this time, only eight came back.
That’s fewer in number, and strikingly, with a new cast of champions.
Every gold India won was won by a team in which even personnel rotation did not affect the core unit. Neeraj Chopra’s javelin, Avinash Sable’s steeplechase, Tajinderpal Singh Toor’s hat-trick bid, both individual shooting golds, the badminton and tennis and squash pairs, and both individual compound archery crowns — all gone, every one of them. In fact, India won 15 team golds in 2023, of which eight were retained. What remains are solo or pair events — 13 in all — where India could not defend the crown.
India is the Asian champion in cricket across both categories and returned with a second consecutive gold. In fact, in the men’s division, India were the only side to land in the Japanese city with a full-strength T20 squad. In hockey, the Indian men’s team finished top of the podium in two of the previous three editions, and with the overall standard of hockey in Asia falling well behind the world level, as seen in the recent World Cup, Harmanpreet Singh’s side cruised to a comfortable win, without a drop of sweat — albeit in the semifinal against Pakistan, when defensive lapses allowed their rivals to storm back and level at 3-3 in the third quarter.
The Indian cricket and kabaddi teams — men and women — the men’s hockey team, and three compound team events — men’s, women’s, and mixed — successfully defended India’s gold at the 2026 Asian Games. And in compound archery, India looked at home defending the men’s, women’s and mixed team golds, having been a dominant force in the events since their introduction at the 2014 Games. And those eight golds were rather routine wins for India, anything less than which would have been an absolute shocker. In kabaddi, India has been the undisputed champion in both the men’s and women’s events in Asia.
