Author: G Rajaraman

Few in the Indian sporting landscape are as comfortable with wearing many hats as Viren Rasquinha is. An Olympian and a captain of the India men’s hockey team, a distinguished alumnus of the prestigious Indian School of Business, CEO of a top sports NGO, columnist and broadcaster and a member of key Government panels, he has been at ease in each role. A member of the Indian team that won the Junior World Championships in Hobart in 2001, he was soon drafted to the senior squad and was part of the squad that played the 2002 Busan Asian Games final…

The young three-member Indian weightlifting squad, expected to be torchbearers for India in the future, will return from Tashkent with rich experience in the Asian Weightlifting Championships, a qualification event for 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Gyaneshwari Yadav, hailing from Chhattisgarh, lifted personal best weights in snatch, clean and jerk as well as total in the women’s 49kg division to produce the best performance by an Indian in the competition, though Ditimoni Sonowal finished fourth in women’s 64kg division to earn the best position among the three lifters. Competing in the same weight category as Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games medalist Mirabai…

Neeraj Chopra weighs his words before articulating his deep thoughts, aware of his growing responsibility as a leader in the Indian sports firmament. It is not often that he pinches time off his schedule to express himself not with the javelin but with words. And when he accepts RevSportz’s invitation to grace TrailBlazers yet again, it is good reason to anticipate his inputs. His inspirational journey from a village lad to Olympic and world champion has been so well documented that it does not need recounting. He makes Indian hearts beat with pride and joy with his desire to remain…

You will agree that each star in the galaxy descending on ITC Royal Bengal in Kolkata in March for India’s biggest sports conclave, TrailBlazers 2.0, a RevSportz initiative, is a pathbreaker himself or herself. Sumit Antil leaves no one in doubt that he is a trailblazer and an inspiration for many with his spectacular set of achievements and his quest for excellence. A road mishap forced Sumit Antil to give up his dreams of being a wrestler, but with a prosthetic left leg, he discovered the javelin, trained with passion and mastered it to such an extent that he has…

India’s top sailor Vishnu Sarvanan gave an excellent demonstration of being in the present, ignoring his fingers being left in bad shape because of the work done on the ropes in the Adelaide coast’s windy conditions and backing himself, when he qualified for his second successive Olympic Games laser sailing competition. While he is relieved that he has qualified for his second successive Olympic Games – and delighted that he did at the ILCA 7 World Championships 2024 – he says he will perhaps appreciate his career only after winning an Olympic medal for India. “To me it does not…

Rohit Sharma will be feeling the heat in the aftermath of the Indian team’s defeat to England in the first Test in Hyderabad. Yet, as he leads the squad to the City of Destiny, as Visakhapatnam is called, for the second Test, he will have had enough time to reflect on ways to raise the morale of the team. Not something he would have expected, but something that has to be done. You may wonder why it has to be the skipper – and not coach Rahul Dravid – who has to ensure that the shoulders do not droop in…

No Pakistan in the Paris Olympic Games hockey? Considering that it is the third straight time that its team will not figure in the men’s hockey competition in the greatest spectacle of sport, it is very tempting to see it as not very shocking, but par for the course. Not a big deal at all, one can say with a shrug of the shoulder or a raised eyebrow. Yet, it is a fact that sporting competitions do not evoke the same awe if one of the most successful teams does not make the grade. You can dismiss one as an…

From champion to conundrum, the immensely gifted badminton ace Lakshya Sen’s journey in the past few months has been overshadowed by the ascent of doubles stars, Satwiksaraj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty. But seven successive first round exits on the BWF World Tour, not counting a walkover that he conceded in Hong Kong, tell their own tale. As he prepares to take on Weng Hong Yang in the Indonesia Masters in Jakarta on Wednesday, Lakshya Sen will have to shut out memories of a defeat by the Chinese World No. 16 in the Malaysia Open in the second week of this…

Photo credits- Twitter With less than 200 days to go for the Paris Olympic Games, another needless controversy has erupted in Indian shooting with potential to impact the team’s preparations. Jaspal Rana, pistol shooter Manu Bhaker’s personal coach, and High Performance Director Pierre Beauchamp have got into a slanging match on social media. Jaspal Rana revealed on social media that he has been asked to leave…

Three track and field athletes, whose urine samples tested positive for banned substances at the 2023 National Games in Goa, have accepted Anti-Doping Rule Violations and agreed with the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) that they would be sanctioned three-year bans. Their sanctions are with effect December 5, 2023, the date their provisional suspensions stared. Punjab’s 24-year-old athletes Harjodhvir Singh (distance running) and Kamaljeet Kaur (sprinting) as well as Goa’s 29-year-old Ajay Kumar (distance running) have joined the growing list of sportspersons who opt for an Agreed Sanction that entails them to have their period of ineligibility reduced by a year.…