2024 yearender: Paris and beyond — young showstoppers step up

A world chess champion at 18. A double Olympic medallist shooter at 22. No Olympic champion, but two Chess Olympiad gold winning teams. The Olympic year for India may have been a mixed bag, but it was also one that unearthed unparalleled achievements in chess.

The showstoppers featured two young protagonists who captured the imagination of sport followers beyond the cricket field and stamped their world-class skills across the chess board and inside the shooting range: Gukesh D and Manu Bhaker.

Manu, just 22 who had been through a full cycle of tasting dizzying success at an early age followed by dampening failure, sprung back to life with a bang in a largely moderate Paris Olympics for India. Gukesh, all of 18, who had until last year pasted photos of past world chess champions as his laptop wallpaper, became one himself to sign off India’s sporting 2024 on a high.

That Gukesh’s tryst with becoming the youngest-ever world champion went back to a late scramble to even qualify for the Candidates tournament is a touch ironic. Once the teen from Tamil Nadu set foot down that path, there was no stopping him.

Alongside compatriots R Praggnanandhaa and Vidit Gujrathi, Gukesh turned up for the Candidates in Toronto in April battling odds to earn the right to challenge world champion Ding Liren. Pre-tournament punts, though, went up in smoke once Gukesh got down to business against some of the top players.

A 17-year-old Gukesh becoming the youngest player to win the Candidates made way for an 18-year-old Gukesh becoming the youngest world champion in the chess history after he dethroned the Chinese in Singapore.

The pre-tournament talk going into the title clash was starkly different to the Candidates. And that is what made the youngster’s composed victory, earned in the final classical game, even more remarkable. Expected to ease past a struggling Ding down on confidence, Gukesh was rocked in the opening tussle even as the Chinese resisted most of the blows that the Indian landed through the 14 rounds. Yet Gukesh patiently waited without getting flustered, and the moment Ding blundered deep into the final classical game, struck a champion-like blow.

World champion Gukesh turned a dreamy final chapter through a defining year for Indian chess.

At the 45th Chess Olympiad in Budapest in September, the Indian teams swept both gold medals on offer (Open and women) to go where no group from the country had ever before. Indian chess has transformed from being largely synonymous to the legend of Viswanathan Anand to now being the buzzing playground of “Vishy’s children”, as Garry Kasparov put it.

“You feel very happy, knowing many of them for many, many years,” Anand said after India’s twin Olympiad triumph. “Also, you know what it means for the country, winning two golds in the same year.”

Someone who now also knows what it means to win two medals in the same Olympics is Manu. The pistol shooter broke the shackles in the country’s six-medal show at the Paris Games, and soon also the glass ceiling of an Indian winning more than a single medal in the same edition. Manu’s twin bronze medals (10m air pistol individual and mixed with Sarabjot Singh) were especially sweeter given the bitter aftertaste that her Olympic debut in Tokyo in 2021 had left. With much expected from the then teen shooter, Manu imploded quite dramatically and attracted plenty of criticism. Three years on, India can’t stop celebrating her.

And Neeraj Chopra can’t stop pocketing medals at the Olympics. Sure, the gold from Tokyo changed colour to silver in Paris, yet for an Indian track and field athlete to become a two-time Olympic medallist when there were none before only reiterated the javelin thrower’s ever-growing legendary status in Indian sport.

Another youngster who stepped up in Paris was Aman Sehrawat. The 21-year-old’s 57kg bronze carried forward the trend of wrestling accounting for at least one Olympic medal to India’s tally since the 2008 Beijing Games, and eased some negativity in a sport grappling with Vinesh Phogat’s dramatic disqualification ahead of her final in Paris and the public protests by top wrestlers through the year.

Two more bronze medals from the men’s hockey team and shooter Swapnil Kusale took India’s tally to six in Paris, a drop by one from Tokyo in a slightly under-par outing. What also ought to be looked at, however, are the six fourth-place finishes by Indians in Paris. It’s a sign of the promise in store but also the gaps to fill in dealing with pressure and rising to the occasion when the moment of reckoning arrives.

India’s Paralympians, however, sure did rise to the occasion, returning with a record haul of 29 medals, including seven golds, from Paris.