2010: Golden year for Indian sports

NEW DELHI: Individual brilliance shone through in record-breaking medal hauls at Commonwealth and Asian Games while the iconic Sachin Tendulkar raised the bar further on the cricket field in what turned out to be a golden year for Indian sports.

There were moments of pure ecstasy when the country's athletes notched up 101 medals (including 38 gold) in the Commonwealth Games here and 64 (14 gold) in the Asian Games in Guangzhou.

It was the best ever medal haul in both events for a nation which hardly looks beyond cricket on its sporting calendar.

Speaking of India's unofficial national sport, cricket, there were cherishable moments all through 2010 and Tendulkar provided two of the biggest ones by fittingly becoming the first batsman to pull off a double century in one-dayers at the beginning of the year before signing off with another first of recording 50 Test hundreds.

But for a change, cricket and Tendulkar did not matter for at least 14 days in October as India hosted its biggest sporting event after the 1982 Asian Games.

The 19th Commonwealth Games were supposed to showcase India as the next big sporting destination but left fans with mixed feelings after a botched build-up but a historic medal haul.

The athletes were undoubtedly on an unprecedented high at the event in front of home fans but the administrators touched a nadir when they made the country a subject of international mockery with preparations so shoddy that it seemed that top participating nations would give the Games a miss.

In fact, administrators were the only source of embarrassment for Indian sports this year because going by on-field performance, 2010 can easily be counted among the most successful in Indian sporting history.

At the centre of it all was Suresh Kalmadi, the man who has headed the Indian Olympic Association for over a decade and was chairman of the organising committee for the CWG.

The messed build-up to CWG was squarely blamed on him but most importantly he was the focus of an alleged multi-crore scam in CWG deals now being investigated by the CBI.

The veteran administrator claimed innocence but damning evidence, some of it chronicled in national dailies, meant that his houses in Pune and Delhi were raided, adding another low to his chequered career.