From competing for food to a gold medal: the stories behind India’s Asian Games winners

There's a strange physics to the underdog story. We like to imagine success as a simple equation—resources in, medals out. But India's 85-medal haul at the Asian Games in Japan breaks that deterministic fantasy. These athletes didn't have sports science labs or million-dollar training regimes; they had hunger, borrowed poles, and secondhand shoes. And yet, against every economic model of performance, they converted scarcity into velocity. It's as if the universe has a hidden variable we haven't yet quantified—call it desperation, call it grit—that occasionally overrides the standard model of athletic achievement. Cricket's gravitational pull in India is so strong that it warps the entire sporting ecosystem around it. To pursue archery or wrestling or boxing in that environment is to swim against a cultural tide. And yet, these athletes did more than swim—they flew. Their victories are not just sporting achievements; they are acts of rebellion against a narrative that says only one sport matters. In a country of 1.4 billion people, the fact that 85 medals emerged from the margins feels less like coincidence and more like proof that talent is uniformly distributed even when opportunity is not. The Mumbai performer mentioned in the piece, turning everyday absurdities into comedy, shares something with these athletes. Both take the raw, unglamorous material of Indian life—the chaos, the contradictions, the impossible logistics—and transmute it into something that makes people stop and pay attention. Comedy and athletic triumph are both alchemy: they take the lead of everyday struggle and turn it into gold, or at least into a medal that gleams like gold. Perhaps the real "weird" here is that absurdity and excellence are two faces of the same survival instinct. What this story whispers to us, beneath the medal counts and human-interest angles, is that our models of human potential are woefully incomplete. We can measure funding, facilities, and coaching hours. We can't measure the strange internal combustion that happens when someone decides that borrowed equipment is enough. There's a lesson in this for anyone who's ever felt under-resourced: the universe doesn't require your permission to make you extraordinary. It just requires your refusal to accept the odds. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/05/this-is-india-asian-games-winners-success