Breakthroughs, breakdowns, and belief: Indian Sport in 2025

Indian sport in 2025 did not ask to be summarised neatly.

It resisted closure. It is split into categories. It refused a single mood.

This was not a year of uncomplicated celebration. Nor was it a year of collapse. It was something more human than that, a year where Indian sport revealed its fractures and its faith in equal measure.

A year where progress arrived unevenly, where history was made quietly, and where the loudest moments were not always the most important ones.

Away from the gravitational pull of men’s cricket, Indian sport lived several lives at once.

When women stopped waiting

Indian women in many sports were always framed as hopefuls. Promising. Almost there.

In 2025, they stopped waiting.

The image that will endure is from a November night in Mumbai: Indian women cricketers lifting the ODI World Cup, not in disbelief or shock, but with the composure of a team that had grown into its moment.

The celebration was cathartic, yes, but also corrective. It rewrote years of near misses and unfinished sentences.

This victory did not stand alone.

Across disciplines, women were no longer exceptions. They were the pattern.

Indian women boxers dismantled the field at the World Boxing Cup, gold medals stacking up until the medal table itself felt lopsided.

Boxers like Jaismine Lamboria and Minakshi Hooda climbed top of world championship podiums with the quiet authority of athletes who know exactly how hard their road has been.

In football, the senior women’s team qualified for the Asian Cup, while the U-20 and U-17 sides followed, each milestone erasing a long-held belief about what Indian women’s football could not do.

This wasn’t a golden generation in the romantic sense.

It was something sturdier, a generation that had been allowed to stay long enough to become dangerous.

Excellence without asterisks

If women defined Indian sports’ direction in 2025, para-athletes redefined its imagination.

There are years where courage becomes a cliché. 2025 was not one of them.

When Sheetal Devi won the para-archery world title, it wasn’t framed as inspiration. It couldn’t be. She did not need narrative assistance.

Born without arms, she shot her way past the world’s best and then did something even more radical: earned selection into India’s able-bodied national squad.

No qualifiers. No asterisks.

Elsewhere, the Indian women’s blind cricket team lifted the inaugural Blind T20 World Cup, their victory barely cutting through the mainstream noise, yet deeply felt within the community it belonged to.

Para-sport in India has spent years fighting invisibility. In 2025, it chose something else instead, excellence so undeniable it could not be ignored.

Running ahead of itself

Indian athletics in 2025 felt like a body learning how fast it could go.

At the Asian level, India was formidable. The medals came from everywhere, hurdles, long distance, and relays. Avinash Sable owned the steeplechase.

Jyothi Yarraji redefined speed over barriers. Gulveer Singh dominated distances that most Indian runners once feared. Animesh Kujur ran into the record books.

It felt like depth. It felt like belief.

And then came the World Championships.

No medals. Injuries. Missed timings. Neeraj Chopra, the man who has carried Indian athletics on his shoulders, fell short while fighting his own body.

The gap between being strong in Asia and being relentless globally still exists. In 2025, Indian athletics finally looked it in the eye.

Badminton’s Uneasy Brilliance

Badminton has always lived close to perfection in India, which is why its imperfections felt sharper in 2025.

There were moments of excellence. Satwik-Chirag did something no Indian men’s pair had done before at the World Tour Finals. Young players arrived unafraid, unburdened by history.

And yet, the sport felt restless.

Team events slipped away. Injuries lingered. Momentum came in bursts, never in stretches. When national coach Pullela Gopichand spoke publicly about financial insecurity in sport, it unsettled people, not because it was wrong, but because it was honest.

Wrestling, always at war with itself

No Indian sport is as talented or as turbulent as wrestling.

In 2025, world titles arrived even as chaos remained permanent. Indian women stood on global podiums. Vinesh Phogat, after stepping away, found her way back. The mat still recognised excellence.

But so did the problems.

Disqualifications for being overweight. Persistent doping anxieties. Governance wounds that refuse to heal. Wrestling continues to produce champions in spite of itself, not because of its systems.

That contradiction remains unresolved.

Two Indias playing Football

Indian football did not fail in 2025. It split.

The men’s national team failed to qualify for the Asian Cup, a quiet collapse that felt less like shock and more like inevitability. Years of uncertainty caught up. The result was not surprising, only sobering.

The women, meanwhile, kept moving forward.

Asian Cup qualification. Youth teams breaking barriers. Girls who no longer saw qualification as ambition, but expectation.

Indian football showed, in the starkest possible terms, what happens when continuity exists, and what happens when it doesn’t.

The departures 

Every year has its quiet goodbyes.

In 2025, Rohan Bopanna walked away from professional tennis, his career a reminder that longevity itself can be an act of defiance.

Sunil Chhetri, the face of Indian football for nearly two decades, finally stepped away from the international game, leaving behind not just goals but a standard of belief in a sport that often struggled to believe in itself.

Aditi Chauhan, India’s pioneering goalkeeper who broke barriers simply by standing between the posts at the highest level, also bowed out, her legacy written in firsts rather than headlines.

Sport is never short of arrivals. It is the departures that teach us what mattered.

As 2025 comes to a close

Indian sport did not find resolution in 2025. What it found instead was clarity.

Women no longer ask for space. Para-athletes no longer ask for permission. Young athletes no longer ask to be patient forever.

And institutions can no longer pretend progress erases responsibility.

As 2025 comes to a close, Indian sport does not stand at a finish line; it stands at a reckoning. The year offered no single emotion to hold on to.

It gave us triumph and turbulence, arrival and absence, hope sharpened by honesty. It reminded us that progress is not a straight ascent, but a negotiation between systems and individuals, between belief and reality.

As the calendar turns, The Bridge wishes its readers a new year filled with sport that is fairer, safer, braver, and stories that continue to ask difficult questions while celebrating hard-won joy.