From poverty to gold: India's Asian Games heroes trained with borrowed equipment

In a country where cricket consumes nearly all the oxygen in the sporting world, India's performance at the Asian Games in Japan offered something rare: a glimpse of the full spectrum of athletic talent the nation contains. The medal count told part of the story—85 medals in total, split across 21 golds, 27 silvers, and 37 bronzes. But the numbers alone miss what made these games significant. Many of the athletes who stood on the podium had arrived there through paths that would seem impossible to most: training with borrowed equipment, competing while their families scraped by on government food subsidies, working odd jobs between practice sessions.

The women's hockey team's gold medal, the first in 44 years, crystallized something larger about what these games meant. For Lalremsiami Hmarzote, a forward on that team, the journey had begun in Mizoram, where she grew up playing barefoot on dirt pitches, traveling roughly 100 miles to reach the only hockey academy in her state. When she scored the winning goal against China in the final—a reverse-stick strike that Hockey India described as stunning—she was making her 200th international appearance. Her story was one among dozens, each carrying its own weight of sacrifice and determination.

Neeru Dhanda's path to becoming the first Indian woman to win an individual gold in trap shooting at the Asian Games began with a borrowed shotgun and tin cans as targets. Her family in Haryana's Jind district depended on government food assistance. Just days before the games began, the 26-year-old spent time in a hospital recovering from illness instead of training. Yet when rain fell on the shooting range in Urenocho, she won not just one gold but two—adding a mixed team trap event victory—along with a silver in the women's team event.

Sahil Jadhav, now 25, had nearly walked away from archery entirely, frustrated by slow progress and the humiliation of competing with borrowed arrows during selection trials. His mother sold her jewelry to buy him professional compound bows. At these games, he won two golds in compound archery events and secured automatic qualification for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Vithya Ramraj, meanwhile, emerged as one of the breakout stars with three medals. Her father had borrowed money to support her and her twin sister's athletic careers. She won gold in the 4x400-meter relay, silver in the mixed 4x400-meter relay, and bronze in the 400-meter hurdles—a race in which she broke a national record that had stood since the era of PT Usha, an Indian sporting legend.

Ancy Sojan, a 25-year-old long jumper from a village in Kerala's Thrissur district, threw herself 6.53 meters to win silver. Earlier in the year, she had broken a national record set in 2004. Her path had been complicated by a diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome, which forced her to overhaul her diet and manage weight fluctuations caused by medication before the tournament. Aslam Inamdar came to kabaddi, a south Asian contact sport blending elements of tag and wrestling, precisely because it required no expensive equipment. Growing up in a village in Maharashtra's Ahilyanagar, he worked cleaning washrooms and laboring in fields to fund his evening training sessions. When India's men's kabaddi team defeated Iran in the gold-medal match, Inamdar was instrumental in the victory. "It still feels like a dream to me," he told the Indian Express. "I often think about how someone who didn't even have food at home now holds two international medals."

Sports broadcaster Siddharth Pandey invoked an old saying from the world of athletics: "You cannot be what you cannot see." He noted that one of the most heartening aspects of these games was watching families and communities rally around four female players from India's north-eastern states, a region that has endured decades of conflict and often finds itself sidelined in national conversation. Recognition matters in ways that extend far beyond individual athletes. Vidya Pillai, the first Indian woman to win a snooker world championship, has spoken publicly about how her sport fails to receive the attention or respect it deserves. Despite her 2023 victory—which came after six unsuccessful world finals and required her to defeat two former world champions—she felt largely unacknowledged. The Asian Games, by contrast, offered a platform for stories that cricket typically drowns out.

Behind India's medal haul lay dozens of athletes and families who had struggled financially, trained with minimal facilities, and often received little institutional support. These stories matter not just as individual triumphs but as evidence of possibility. When a country sees and celebrates sporting talent across the full spectrum, future generations begin to imagine different paths for themselves. That recognition, Pandey suggested, could reshape which sports young people in India choose to pursue, and which dreams they dare to chase.