🏅 Indian athletes who never get any coverage

Last week I saw a short interview with an athlete from a sport I'd never followed. She talked about training 6 days a week and paying for travel from her own pocket. The video had barely any views. A video of a cricketer's new haircut gets lakhs. I watched the whole thing twice and then felt bad that I'd never heard her name. I told a friend who follows a lot of other sports. She named 5 or 6 people right away. I didn't recognise any of them, and she said that's exactly the problem. Some of them had won medals abroad. She said they get a mention on the news on a slow day. She said sometimes there is only one line on the screen at the bottom. It's easy to blame the channels. But I'm the one who changes the channel when cricket isn't on. I never watched a badminton match until a cousin put one on at a wedding last year. I was shouting at the TV within 5 minutes. My cousin said I'd missed out on years of it. So I've started following 2 sports I knew nothing about. It's not much, but it's more than I did. I'm learning the names slowly. I keep a note on my phone and add a name whenever I hear one. Even small things help. I watch the full match instead of the highlights and I tell people about it. My mother in law thinks it's funny that I now ask her to wait until the match finishes before dinner. Who do you follow that most people haven't heard of? I need more names for my note.

Coverage seems to follow whichever sport already has a built in audience rather than helping build one for something new and clearly deserving of it too, which keeps quietly talented athletes stuck in the exact same cycle of being overlooked year after year, no matter how many medals eventually pile up on a dusty shelf somewhere at home unnoticed by anyone.

My cousin represented the state in an individual sport for nearly a decade with almost zero sponsorship the entire time, funding mostly came from family savings rather than any proper support system backing her up. That story is far more common around here than most people watching casually from the outside would probably ever assume it to be at all.

A para athlete from a nearby district medalled internationally last year and barely got covered locally beyond one small newspaper column tucked away near the very back pages somewhere, which felt properly unfair given how much quiet work clearly went into that achievement over several long years that most people around here never even hear about happening at all, ever.