Sports — Major Tournaments and Indian Achievements

For the judiciary aspirant, sport is never merely about who stood on the podium. Behind every medal lies a regulatory architecture — federations, anti-doping codes, betting statutes and a steady line of Supreme Court rulings on whether bodies such as the BCCI are amenable to writ jurisdiction. This chapter braids the two strands together: the headline achievements that examiners love to test as current affairs, and the case-law on sports governance that surfaces in constitutional and administrative-law papers. We move from Neeraj Chopra's javelin to Zee Telefilms, from Gukesh's world title to the National Sports Governance Act, 2025, so that a single read equips you for both the general-studies MCQ and the descriptive law question.

The Olympic Games and India at Paris 2024

The modern Olympic Games, revived by Pierre de Coubertin in 1896 and now staged quadrennially under the International Olympic Committee, remain the apex multi-sport event. At the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics India returned with six medals — one silver and five bronze — finishing 71st on the medal table. The standout was Manu Bhaker, who took bronze in the women's 10m air pistol and a second bronze in the mixed-team 10m air pistol alongside Sarabjot Singh, becoming the first Indian to win two medals at a single edition of the Games since independence and the first Indian woman to win an Olympic shooting medal.

India's other Paris medals came through Swapnil Kusale (shooting, men's 50m rifle three positions bronze), the men's hockey team (bronze, repeating their Tokyo feat), Aman Sehrawat (wrestling bronze) and, most prominently, Neeraj Chopra, whose 89.45m throw earned silver behind Pakistan's Arshad Nadeem and an Olympic record of 92.97m. Chopra thereby became one of a small group of Indians to win medals at two consecutive Olympics. Aman Sehrawat, at twenty-one, became India's youngest individual Olympic medallist, while the near-misses — four fourth-place finishes — were the source of considerable post-Games reflection on the thin margins that separate the podium from anonymity.

Paris also produced a cautionary tale in sports law. Wrestler Vinesh Phogat, having reached the women's 50kg freestyle final, was disqualified on the morning of the bout for being roughly 100 grams overweight. She challenged the disqualification before an ad hoc division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport seated in Paris, seeking a shared silver; the application was dismissed. The episode is a vivid illustration of how the apex tribunal of sport operates in real time and why aspirants must understand its jurisdiction. For examination purposes, note the distinction between the IOC (the parent body), the Indian Olympic Association (its national counterpart) and the federations that govern each discipline, because the legal status of these bodies is repeatedly litigated, as we shall see.

Tokyo 2020 and the Neeraj Chopra milestone

The Paris result is best read against the watershed of the Tokyo 2020 Games (held in 2021 owing to the pandemic). There, Neeraj Chopra threw 87.58m to win India's first-ever Olympic gold in athletics — indeed, India's first medal of any colour in track and field. He became only the second Indian after shooter Abhinav Bindra (Beijing 2008) to win an individual Olympic gold. Chopra consolidated this in 2023 by becoming world champion at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, completing a rare double of reigning Olympic and world titles.

India's Tokyo haul of seven medals — its best at the time — also included the men's hockey bronze, ending a 41-year Olympic medal drought in the sport, plus weightlifting silver (Mirabai Chanu) and wrestling and badminton medals. These milestones are frequently paired in current-affairs questions with the government schemes that funded them; we return to Khelo India and the Target Olympic Podium Scheme below.

The Asian Games and India's century at Hangzhou 2023

The Asian Games, organised by the Olympic Council of Asia and first held at New Delhi in 1951, is the continent's premier multi-sport event. At the 19th edition in Hangzhou, China (held in 2023, the "2022" Games having been postponed), India crossed the hundred-medal mark for the first time in history, winning 107 medals — 28 gold, 38 silver and 41 bronze. India thus became only the fourth nation, after China, Japan and South Korea, to win 100 or more medals at a single Asian Games.

The Hangzhou campaign showcased depth across archery, shooting, athletics, squash and emerging sports. Shooting alone contributed 22 medals, the largest single-discipline haul, and the archery compound teams swept their events; Neeraj Chopra successfully defended his javelin gold. The 107-medal figure is a favourite examiner's fact precisely because it is round and record-setting, and because it represents a quantum leap over the 70 medals of Jakarta 2018. Aspirants should remember New Delhi's pioneering role in 1951 — when India hosted the inaugural Asian Games — and again in 1982, when the Games returned to the capital. These historical anchors recur in static general knowledge alongside the current-affairs medal tally, and the Olympic Council of Asia's stewardship of the event provides a neat link to the wider study of international sporting bodies.

The Commonwealth Games — Birmingham 2022

The Commonwealth Games, contested every four years among nations of the Commonwealth, gave India a strong showing at Birmingham 2022. Indian athletes won 61 medals — 22 gold, 16 silver and 23 bronze — to finish fourth behind Australia, England and Canada. A notable point for examiners is that Birmingham dropped shooting and archery, disciplines in which India traditionally excels, which makes the medal count all the more creditable.

The 2010 edition, hosted by New Delhi, remains historically significant both as India's best-ever home Commonwealth performance — 101 medals, second on the table — and for the corruption controversies that followed, which led to criminal prosecution of organising-committee officials. That saga is a standing reminder that sports administration sits squarely within the reach of anti-corruption and public-accountability law, and it foreshadowed the governance concerns that later animated the Lodha reforms. At Birmingham, India's golds spanned wrestling, weightlifting (with Mirabai Chanu and Achinta Sheuli among the winners), table tennis, badminton (Lakshya Sen, P.V. Sindhu and the men's doubles pair) and the lawn-bowls women's team — a maiden gold in that discipline. Such granular detail is exactly what distinguishes a well-prepared candidate. The future of the Commonwealth Games is itself an examiner's talking point: Glasgow is set to host a slimmed-down 2026 edition after the original host, the Australian state of Victoria, withdrew on cost grounds.

Cricket: World titles and the BCCI's monopoly

Cricket dominates India's sporting consciousness, and 2024 brought a landmark: the Indian men's team won the ICC Men's T20 World Cup, beating South Africa by seven runs at the Kensington Oval, Barbados, on 29 June 2024. It was India's second T20 World Cup, ending a 17-year wait since the inaugural 2007 triumph, and prompted the T20I retirements of Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli (the Player of the Match with 76) and Ravindra Jadeja. The victory came barely eight months after the heartbreak of the 2023 ICC Men's ODI World Cup, which India hosted and dominated through the league stage before losing the final at the Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad, to Australia by six wickets — Travis Head's 137 the decisive innings. Virat Kohli was named Player of the Tournament with a record 765 runs, and Mohammed Shami finished as the leading wicket-taker with 24; both facts are standard examiner fare.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), a society registered under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act, governs the sport without any statutory charter. That private-law character has driven landmark constitutional litigation. In Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India (2005) 4 SCC 649, a Constitution Bench held by majority that the BCCI is not "State" within Article 12 of the Constitution, since it is not created by statute and is not financially, functionally or administratively dominated by the Government. Crucially, however, the Court accepted that the BCCI discharges public functions, so that an aggrieved party retains a remedy under Article 226 before the High Courts even though Article 32 does not lie. This bifurcation — no Article 12, yet writable under Article 226 — is a perennial favourite in constitutional papers and links to the broader theme of India's role in international sporting bodies like the ICC.

The Lodha Committee and BCCI v. Cricket Association of Bihar

The BCCI's governance was overhauled through Board of Control for Cricket in India v. Cricket Association of Bihar. Following the 2013 IPL spot-fixing and betting scandal, the Supreme Court in 2015 [(2015) 3 SCC 251] appointed a committee headed by former Chief Justice of India R.M. Lodha, with Justices Ashok Bhan and R.V. Raveendran, to recommend structural reforms. The Lodha Committee's January 2016 report proposed sweeping changes: the one-state-one-vote principle, a 70-year age cap and three-year cooling-off periods for office bearers, exclusion of ministers and civil servants, and a clear separation between cricket's administrative and commercial wings.

By its order of 18 July 2016 [(2016) 8 SCC 535], a Bench of Chief Justice T.S. Thakur and Justice F.M.I. Kalifulla accepted most of the recommendations with modifications, directing the BCCI to amend its constitution accordingly — though the contentious question of legalising betting was left to the legislature. The case is a textbook illustration of the judiciary structuring the governance of a powerful private body that performs public functions, and is often paired in mains answers with the reforms eventually codified in the National Sports Governance Act, 2025, discussed below.

Betting, gambling and the game-of-skill doctrine

Indian law distinguishes sharply between games of skill, which generally enjoy constitutional protection as trade under Article 19(1)(g), and games of chance, which States may prohibit. The foundational authority is State of Andhra Pradesh v. K. Satyanarayana, AIR 1968 SC 825, where the Supreme Court held that rummy is "mainly and preponderantly a game of skill," since the fall of the cards must be memorised and skill is required in holding and discarding — distinguishing it from pure games of chance such as the "three-card" game.

The doctrine was extended to wagering in Dr. K.R. Lakshmanan v. State of Tamil Nadu, AIR 1996 SC 1153, where the Court held that horse racing is a game of skill because the outcome turns on the form, fitness and breeding of the horse and the skill of the jockey, and that betting on it is therefore not "gambling." The Court there usefully defined a "game of chance" as one in which the element of chance predominates over skill, and a "game of skill" as one in which skill predominates, treating the latter as a business or trade protected by Article 19(1)(g).

Because betting and gambling fall under Entry 34 of the State List, regulation varies markedly State to State, and the explosion of online fantasy sports, rummy and poker has spawned a fresh wave of litigation applying the Satyanarayana and Lakshmanan tests. High Courts have repeatedly upheld online fantasy formats such as those operated by Dream11 as games of skill, and the Supreme Court has declined to interfere with that line of reasoning. The legislative response has been uneven — Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and other States have attempted blanket bans on online real-money games, several of which were struck down by High Courts for being disproportionate and for failing to distinguish skill from chance. The Union then changed the terrain decisively with the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 (assented to on 22 August 2025), which imposes a blanket prohibition on online "money games" — pointedly extending the ban to games of skill, games of chance and hybrids alike — while encouraging e-sports and social games. By legislating across the skill-chance divide that the courts had so carefully drawn, the 2025 Act has itself become a likely subject of constitutional challenge on Article 19(1)(g) and proportionality grounds. For the examiner, the load-bearing propositions are the skill-versus-chance distinction, the State-List competence under Entry 34, the Article 19(1)(g) protection historically enjoyed by skill-based formats, and the fresh tension created where central legislation overrides that protection.

Anti-doping law and the Court of Arbitration for Sport

Doping is the most heavily litigated area of sports regulation. India enacted the National Anti-Doping Act, 2022, giving statutory footing to the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) and the National Dope Testing Laboratory, and creating a National Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel and an Appeal Panel. The Act aligns Indian procedure with the World Anti-Doping Code, and for international-level athletes permits a direct appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, the global apex tribunal for sports disputes whose awards are enforceable under the New York Convention.

The 2022 Act drew criticism from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) over the scope for government interference in NADA's functioning, in particular the powers of the National Board for Anti-Doping in Sports over the disciplinary and appeal panels — a concern because the WADA Code insists on the operational independence of national anti-doping organisations. This prompted the National Anti-Doping (Amendment) Bill, 2025 to reinforce the agency's autonomy and to permit WADA to appeal directly to CAS where no domestic appeal has been filed. The Vinesh Phogat episode at Paris, though a weigh-in rather than a doping matter, underscored the same lesson: CAS, not the Indian courts, is the forum of last resort in Olympic disputes, and its ad hoc divisions decide within the compressed timeframe of the Games themselves. Aspirants should grasp the architecture: NADA enforces, the Disciplinary Panel adjudicates, the Appeal Panel hears domestic appeals, and CAS sits at the apex for international athletes — a tiered dispute-resolution model that mirrors structures studied in international organisations.

The National Sports Governance Act, 2025

The long-awaited National Sports Governance Act, 2025 received Presidential assent on 18 August 2025 after passage by the Lok Sabha on 11 August and the Rajya Sabha on 12 August 2025. For the first time it codifies a statutory framework for the recognition, governance and oversight of national sports bodies, replacing the patchwork of executive sports codes and ad-hoc judicial intervention exemplified by the Lodha saga.

The Act provides for the recognition of national sports federations, mandates governance standards and athlete-welfare measures, establishes a National Sports Tribunal for dispute resolution, and seeks alignment with the Olympic Charter and the international federations' rules. It complements the Khelo Bharat Niti (National Sports Policy) 2025 approved by the Cabinet on 1 July 2025. Read together with the companion anti-doping amendment, the 2025 legislation marks a decisive shift from court-supervised reform to a codified statutory regime — a development that pairs naturally in answers with the flagship sports schemes the state has rolled out.

Sports schemes: Khelo India and TOPS

India's recent medal surge is widely attributed to two flagship interventions of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. The Khelo India programme, launched in 2017, works at the grassroots and school level to identify talent, build infrastructure and stage age-group national competitions, feeding athletes into the high-performance pipeline. The Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS), introduced in 2014 and revamped in 2018, provides elite athletes with customised financial and logistical support — coaching, equipment, foreign exposure and a monthly stipend — ahead of the Olympics and Paralympics.

The two schemes are designed to dovetail: Khelo India identifies and nurtures, TOPS funds the podium contenders. Officials have linked India's best-ever Olympic and Asian Games performances to this pipeline, which makes the schemes high-yield current-affairs material that connects to the wider universe of Indian government schemes.

The chess renaissance: Gukesh and the double Olympiad gold

Chess has become the jewel of India's intellectual sport. In December 2024, eighteen-year-old D. Gukesh (Gukesh Dommaraju) defeated defending champion Ding Liren of China to become the youngest undisputed World Chess Champion in history, breaking a record held by Garry Kasparov since 1985. He is the second Indian to hold the world title after the five-time champion Viswanathan Anand, who first won it in 2000 and reunified it in 2007.

Earlier in 2024, India achieved a historic double gold at the 45th FIDE Chess Olympiad in Budapest, the men's team (Gukesh, Arjun Erigaisi, R. Praggnanandhaa, Vidit Gujrathi and Harikrishna) and the women's team both topping the podium for the first time, with Gukesh and Erigaisi taking individual board golds. These triumphs are frequently linked in current-affairs sets to civilian and sporting honours; the relationship between sporting feats and state recognition is explored under awards and honours.

The global tournament calendar at a glance

Beyond the marquee events above, examiners expect familiarity with the wider calendar. The FIFA World Cup (football's quadrennial championship, organised by FIFA), the ICC Cricket World Cup and ICC T20 World Cup, the Hockey World Cup, the Thomas and Uber Cups and the BWF World Championships in badminton, the Davis Cup in tennis, and the Khelo India Youth Games domestically all feature regularly. India hosted the 2023 ICC Men's ODI Cricket World Cup, reaching the final before losing to Australia at Ahmedabad.

For multi-sport events, the sequence of host cities and the next editions are reliably tested: the 2026 Asian Games are slated for Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, and the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics will mark cricket's return to the Olympic programme after 128 years. Tracking which discipline is added or dropped, and where the next edition is hosted, is the kind of forward-looking awareness that converts a good current-affairs score into a top one.

Para-sport and the widening medal base

India's para-athletes have transformed the country's standing at the Paralympic Games. At Paris 2024 the contingent returned a record 29 medals — seven gold, nine silver and 13 bronze — comfortably surpassing the 19-medal haul at Tokyo 2020 and lifting India to 18th on the medal table, the nation's best Paralympic finish. A record 84 para-athletes were fielded. Para-shooter Avani Lekhara retained her women's 10m air rifle SH1 title to become the first Indian woman to win two Paralympic golds, while para-javelin star Sumit Antil defended his F64 title with a Games record. These results reflect both individual brilliance and the institutional support extended through TOPS, which expressly covers Paralympic medal prospects. Para-badminton, para-athletics and para-shooting have become consistent medal sources, and the parity of recognition — equal cash awards and honours for Olympic and Paralympic medallists — is itself a point of policy worth noting.

The legal and administrative framework for para-sport runs through the Paralympic Committee of India and is now caught within the recognition regime of the National Sports Governance Act, 2025. For aspirants, the headline is the broadening of India's medal base beyond traditional strongholds, a structural story that complements the schemes and statutes covered above and rounds out a holistic view of current affairs for the judiciary.