Nari Shakti shapes Indian sports in 2025 amid challenges

Whether it was the brutal boxing ring, the rough and tumble of a cricket field, the mind games on a chess board or finding the precise target in shooting and archery, the year 2025 well and truly belonged to India’s path-breaking sportswomen who were an unstoppable force across disciplines.

A 19-year-old chess prodigy Divya Deshmukh became India’s first woman World Cup winner. The Harmanpreet Kaur-led cricket team smiled through a difficult phase and shut out kitchen taunts on social media to claim the silverware in the ODI format against all expectations.

At the shooting range, another 19-year-old, Suruchi Singh, amassed four World Cup gold medals, including three individual, in the 10m air pistol competition to make her presence felt in a category that was synonymous with double Olympic-medallist Manu Bhaker up until now. On the football pitch, while the men hobbled from one setback to another, the women offered a glimmer of hope by qualifying for next year’s AFC Asian Cup.

With that singular triumph, they managed to be the face saver for a sport that is under immense scrutiny for consistently poor men’s results and administrative collapse under current All India Football Federation (AIFF) President Kalyan Chaubey.

The Sheetal superiority: At the archery arena, 18-year-old wonder woman Sheetal Devi didn’t just become the first ever armless para world champion but also made it to the national team for an able-bodied international competition.

In doing so, the remarkable young woman from Jammu and Kashmir’s Kishtwar became the living embodiment of the Olympic spirit that pushes athletes to go faster, aim higher, and strive to be stronger. She wasn’t the only one to make a statement though, the Indian blind women’s cricket team too returned a world champion from Sri Lanka. Led by Deepika TC, these women told gut-wrenching tales of how even three meals a day was nothing short of luxury for them as they chased a World Cup.

They weren’t up for a windfall even after the trophy but life was certain to get a lot better as some sponsors and state governments stepped up to lift them financially. Inside the boxing ring, the men struggled to get going through the year but Jaismine Lamboria and Minakshi Hooda lifted spirits with gold medals in the world championship.

Of the two, Jaismine, who competes in the Olympic-approved 57kg division, is a legitimate medal hope in the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Chanu unchallenged: There was no challenging the Mirabai Chanu supremacy in weightlifting for another year.

The diminutive Manipuri, who burst into the national consciousness with a disarming smile and a silver in the Tokyo Olympics, continued to be the one to beat despite not even being close to her best. She picked up a world championship silver to go with a Commonwealth Championships gold despite being pulled back by a persisting back issue.

With her coveted 49kg category no longer a part of the Olympic roster, it remains to be seen how she recaliberates her path to the Los Angeles Games in 2028. Antim bright spot in wrestling: On the wrestling mat too, Antim Panghal made sure that Olympic bronze-winner Aman Sehrawat’s underwhelming performance wasn’t the only talking point of the year.

Her bronze in the world championship was worth its weight in gold given that Indian wrestling did not have much to celebrate due to doping controversies and grapplers such as Aman turning up overweight in the biggest event. 90m for NC, cricket roller-coaster: As is the case every year, Indian sport was a sum total of many triumphs and several heartbreaks.

And in all of this, it wasn’t that men didn’t have their moments. The cricket team, for one, picked up the Champions Trophy and later the Asia Cup in Dubai with astonishing ease, while javelin throw ace Neeraj Chopra finally scaled the 90m peak in the Doha Diamond League.

However, Chopra could not medal at the World Championships, hampered by an adductor muscle niggle, while the cricketers endured a challenging Test season, marred by a home whitewash at the hands of a meticulous South Africa. The red-ball struggles were down to a transitional phase in Indian cricket triggered by the retirements of the two of its biggest batting icons — Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli.

Even though the country got a new captain in Shubman Gill to obsess over, the two veterans remained the biggest draws for fans and the most talked about subjects for the ever-increasing tribe of cricket pundits. This was despite the fact that both Rohit and Kohli are now just ODI players.

Under-fire head coach Gautam Gambhir and chief selector Ajit Agarkar persistently evaded a direct response on the duo’s 2027 World Cup chances. But the two made a quiet statement of intent by showing up for the domestic grind to make sure that the powers that be do not see them as “non committal”.

The men’s hockey team too had a fairly decent year as the senior side won the Asia Cup to qualify for the 2026 World Cup and the juniors claimed a bronze at their home World Cup.

New sports law, CWG bid and doping woes: India’s growth in terms of international performances was more or less satisfactory this year too. But what remained a major area of concern was the administration of sports as made evident by the AIFF’s struggles to even find a commercial partner.

The Sports Ministry under Dr Mansukh Mandaviya sought to address this with the National Sports Governance Act which seeks to put in place the administrators and their handling of finances under greater scrutiny.

The new law will come into force early next year and the rules for its implementation are in the final stages of being locked in after legal consultations. A robust administrative set-up would be crucial going forward as the country prepares to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games in Ahmedabad after winning the bid in November.

The more ambitious Olympic bid is still a work in progress after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) halted the entire process to reassess its own standards of deciding a host city. A major stumbling block for India in that process could be its shambolic doping record.

For a third straight year, India topped the list of countries with the highest rate of adverse results in the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) testing data for 2024. What could count as a small victory in the fight against doping is the marginal decline in India’s overall positivity rate despite a higher number of tests done in 2024.

Indo-Pak sports policy: Another thorny issue that the sports ministry had to deal with this year was the India-Pakistan sporting ties in the aftermath of the gruesome terror attack in Pahalgam that left 26 dead.

It responded by codifying what was essentially an unspoken rule till now — no bilaterals with the arch foes, not even at neutral venues. However, an exception was made for multi-nation events citing the Olympic Charter that prohibits political discrimination.

That exception allowed Indo-Pak cricket to continue unabated in multi-nation tournaments like the Champions Trophy and Asia Cup where these matches were strategically scheduled on Sundays to ensure a high viewership and higher ad revenue for broadcasters from sponsors.

Messi courts India with G.O.A.T Tour: One showpiece on India’s sporting calendar that had almost nothing to do with sport but triggered a frenzied reaction from fans was Argentine superstar Lionel Messi’s four-city, three-day tour of the country.

Over `100 crore were spent to bring the enigmatic striker here by a private organiser, who ended up jailed after the tour started chaotically in Kolkata. Messi’s role was largely restricted to posing for pictures, and smiling and waving at the hordes of fans who spent thousands for tickets.

The trip went off smoothly for most part after the hiccup in Kolkata where he had to be whisked away early after politicians hijacked the event in front of an agitated crowd that went on to vandalise the iconic Salt Lake Stadium.

The chaos in Kolkata was, in fact, an apt representation of India’s equation with sports. Hero worship, more often than not, takes precedence over the game itself, which is what happened when Messi touched base even as domestic football struggles to find its space barring two or three clubs.

Looking ahead to 2026: If 2025 was about finding new stars on the horizon, 2026 could well prove to be the year that makes or breaks them. With the men’s T20 World Cup, the women’s T20 World Cup, the hockey World Cup, the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games lined up, many new reputations would be built and some may even fall apart as the rigours of international sport come into