EYES ON THE SCOREBOARD

Can we hold position on the medals-tally tables, in a year of a (pared-down) Commonwealth Games; can we raise our score at the Asian Games? Which athletes hold out the greatest hope?

- Rutvick Mehta

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.