Games on: Paris gleams with the promise of gold

It's an Olympic year, which means little of the sporting action before or after that mega-spectacle is likely to feel like it matters. All eyes will be on how things unfold over that one fortnight this year, as Paris hosts athletes of the world from July 26 to August 11.

- Rutvick Mehta

This will be the world's first Summer Olympics-as-normal since Rio 2016. Fans return to the party, after a delayed and spectator-less Tokyo Games, muted by the pandemic. This will also be an Olympics unlike most others, coming as it does only three years after the postponed Tokyo Olympics were finally held in 2021.

In this current curtailed cycle, India's athletes have taken strides in the right direction.

At the Birmingham Commonwealth Games in 2022, India took home 61 medals, behind only Australia (178), England (176) and Canada (92). This came a year after the country's seven-medal outing at the Tokyo Olympics, its highest medal tally ever at the Games.

And then of course there were the Asian Games in Hangzhou, where India broke its records of best-ever medal haul, raising it from 70, a record set in 2018, to 107 in 2023.

The country will now be watching to see if this brave new generation of Indian athletes can translate the high of triple-digit Asian Games medals into double-digit Olympics podium finishes.