India hopes to make 'surprise' gains in CWG

Birmingham: India's top-five standing in the Commonwealth Games will be threatened in shooting's absence while the Birmingham 2022 organisers would look to deliver a successful sporting spectacle after a challenging build-up. The opening ceremony at the Alexander Stadium on Thursday evening will mark the beginning of the sporting extravaganza that remains huge in scale but is fighting to remain relevant.

The UK is hosting the mega event for the third time in the last 20 years with the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) unable to attract new bidders out of the 56 countries that made up the sporting body due to cost constraints. The CGF has 72 members but is made up of 56 countries. Birmingham too was rather a late entry in the bidding for the the 2022 edition after South Africa expressing its inability to stage the event back in 2017. "We need to make the Games more affordable and take it to cities which are yet to host them," Birmingham 2022 CEO Ian Reid told PTI.

The Games, set to be the biggest and most expensive sporting event in the UK since the 2012 London Olympics, have had to deal with the adverse impact of COVID-19 though the budget remains at 778 million pounds till date. That number needs to come down for the smaller nations interested in bidding for the event.

India's top-five finish not a given this time

While India remains far from becoming a sporting superpower, the CWG have been a happy hunting ground for the largest nation in the Commonwealth. A top-five finisher since the 2002 edition, India has relied a lot on shooting which was controversially dropped from the Birmingham Games programme. In the Gold Coast Games four years ago, shooters won 25 per cent of India's total medals of 66 and the sport had contributed seven gold.

The big question is how will India compensate for the absence of shooting? A bagful of medals are expected in weightlifting, badminton, boxing, wrestling and table tennis but they might not be enough to offset the loss caused by shooting's absence. Athletics, in which India has won only 28 medals in the event's 72-year-old history, was expected to be a dark horse this time but Olympic champion Neeraj Chopra's late pull out due to injury has come as a huge setback.