Flashback One: October 12, 2010 A packed, screaming Nehru Stadium rises to its feet as the petit Mandeep Kaur hammers her way to the tape, and gold medal, in the women’s 4x400 metres relay at the Delhi Commonwealth Games.

Flashback Two: November 26, 2010 Almost exactly six weeks later, Manjeet Kaur, Ashwini Akkunji, Sini Jose and Mandeep do it again. This time their run is even better planned and the massive near-sold out Guangdong Olympic Stadium is awed into silence as the Indian quartet repeat their CWG success. It is in fact, India’s third straight win in the women’s 1600m relay at the Asian Games.
Flashback Three: December 19, 2010 The Hong Kong Super Series podium bears a familiar sight in women’s badminton this year as Saina Nehwal climbs to the top step, arms held aloft to claim her fifth major title of the year.

Little wonder then that India’s sportspersons and administrators cannot stop smiling, scams, national embarrassments and all. Many of them will look back fondly at the year 2010. In many ways, it could well turn out to be a watershed in India’s sporting march towards a proper place in the world’s hierarchy. Given the immense size — and composition — of its population and the growing prosperity that a wakening economy generally brings, the nation looks to have finally turned the corner towards more rewarding times.
Expectedly, the cricket team ended the year at the top of the pile in the Test ratings and in second place behind a fading Australia in the ODI rankings. Though Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s men won just a single multi-lateral event — the Asia Cup — while losing in three other finals, they kept a clean sheet in Test matches, but more of that later.
Hyderabad howitzer Saina Nehwal capped a memorable year with three Super Series victories and the Commonwealth Games gold medal, though her Asian Games campaign thereafter was cut short abruptly. Nehwal’s display in some ways encapsulated the dominance India’s women athletes through the year, capped by a sterling medal haul at the Guangzhou Asian Games.
M.C. Mary Kom provided sporting aspirations the early impetus with her fifth straight world championship boxing title. The tyke — and mother of two — from Manipur was indeed such an inspirational force that her state-mates turned out in droves to net medals almost at will, especially at the Delhi Commonwealth Games.
It was finally left for Bimol Mayanglambam to break the women’s stranglehold on medal success for his state as the youngster battled his way to a wushu gold in the men’s 60kg category, though even here, he was outdone by Sandhyara Wangkhem, who nicked silver in the women’s 60kg class.
Looked at from almost every angle, India’s athletes did the nation proud. Never before has the country gone past the century mark at major multi-disciplinary events — for the sake of propriety one will not include the various South Asian extravaganzas here where India routinely rake in medals by the hundreds — but managed to do so at the Delhi Commonwealth Games. At Guangzhou, they bettered their best medal tally at the Asiad level.
Quite understandably, there is talk of setting a target of 10 medals or more at the London Olympic Games. This in itself is significant, for never has the sports establishment here ever projected such figures from the Summer Games. Clearly, the success at Delhi and Guangzhou has created an undercurrent of optimism for an even bigger stage.
Virdhawal Khade, the gangling Karnataka teenager, snapped a two-decade jinx when he splashed his way to the men’s 50-metre butterfly in China. Khazan Singh Tokas was till then the first, and last, Indian swimmer to take a medal of any sort at the Asian Games. And if that was sensational, what another 19-year-old achieved was nothing short of epochal. Ashish Kumar of Varanasi first took a silver and bronze in artistic gymnastics at the CWG. He then went one
better at Guangzhou, where the competition was truly world-class in the presence of the Chinese and Japanese, and won a bronze in the floor exercises. Just these two achievements gave Indian sporting success a different glow for 2010.
Meanwhile, it was business as usual for Dhoni and Co, who kept their slate clean for the year, winning four and drawing one series to stretch their unbeaten record to seven series in a row since 2008-09.
The blemishes were there too, three finals of four lost in ODIs and a disastrous campaign in the World T20s. But the fact that Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag and Venkatasai Laxman continued to charm or frustrate, but still grind out the runs, along with Chennai Super Kings’s T20 double meant that once again, all was well when it came to Indian cricket!