Top five sports that have supplied India’s Asian Games gold medals
India have won 183 gold medals across Asian Games history since making their debut at the 1951 Games, and recorded a national best of 28 gold medals at the 2022 edition; with the 2026 Games approaching, five sports account for a large share of those golds.
India have featured in every edition of the Asian Games, with a stated focus on improving at each tournament and a steady rise to being regarded among the stronger challengers at the event; the following five disciplines have delivered sustained success for India over the past few decades.
Tennis produced India’s first continental singles gold when Ramanathan Krishnan won in 1958, and the sport’s Asian Games record for the country was built further by Leander Paes, who won five gold medals between 1994 and 2006. Somdev Devvarman added a couple more gold medals to India’s tennis tally, and Rohan Bopanna together with Rutuja Bhosale claimed the mixed doubles gold at the 2022 Asian Games.
Wrestling’s first Indian gold came through Maruti Mane at the 1962 Games, and competitors such as Changdi Ram, Rajinder Singh, Kartar Singh and Satpal Singh brought success through the 1970s and 1980s. The sport then experienced a downturn before Yogeshwar Dutt ended a 28-year gold drought for India in wrestling, and more recent gold medalists include Bajrang Punia and Vinesh Phogat.
Kabaddi yielded a long run of Indian supremacy: the men’s team won every edition from the sport’s Asian Games debut in Beijing 1990 through Incheon 2014, while the women’s event, introduced in 2010, saw India win the first two editions. That streak ended at the 2018 Jakarta Games when Iran eliminated the men in the semi-finals and beat the women in the final; India reclaimed both the men’s and women’s titles at Hangzhou, taking the sport’s all-time gold medal total for the country to 11.
Shooting has been a consistent source of medals for India at multi-sport events, with Jaspal Rana clinching India’s first shooting gold medal at the 1994 Asian Games and repeating his heroics in Doha 2006, where he went on to win three gold medals in the same edition.
Athletics leads India’s overall Asian Games medal table by event count and has supplied the most medals to India at the Asian Games (85). Lavy Pinto opened the country’s athletics gold account at Delhi 1951 by winning both the 100m and 200m, Milkha Singh added four gold medals thereafter, and P. T. Usha won four gold medals at Seoul 1986. More recently Neeraj Chopra secured his second straight javelin gold at the 2022 Hangzhou Games, while Avinash Sable won gold in the steeplechase and Tajinderpal Singh Toor took gold in the shot put; India won seven gold medals in athletics at the 2023 Asian Games and will hope to improve that tally when the Aichi-Nagoya edition concludes.
With the 2026 Games just around the corner, these five disciplines — tennis, wrestling, kabaddi, shooting and athletics — are the areas in which India have historically collected the largest number of Asian Games gold medals.