India finished 48th on the medal tally in Tokyo, its highest ranking in over four decades (if one were to go by the total number of medals, India would have actually finished 33rd. However, ranking is done primarily based on gold medals won). The previous best in this period was the 51st rank finish at Beijing in 2008, when India won three medals, including Abhinav Bindra’s gold.
India has finished significantly higher in the era in which it used to win gold in hockey, but that time is not really comparable both because of the dozens of countries that have come into being since then and the expansion in the number of sports and hence medals. In Moscow, for instance, India finished at 23rd rank but with just a solitary medal, the hockey gold. A repeat of that at Tokyo would have placed India at joint 63rd, a measure of how different the two eras are.
In London 2012, India had finished 57th despite winning more medals than in Beijing because the medal table ranks countries by gold, silver and bronze in that order and India didn’t win a gold in London. In Rio in 2016, the medal tally crashed to just two and so did the ranking to 67th. From there, it’s now gone up nearly 20 places.
1 gold, 2 silver, 4 bronze – India produced it’s richest-ever medal haul and the finest performance of all time at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which ended on Sunday. Here are the men and women of steel and thunder who made India proud and gave the nation something to cheer about in these dark times of a deadly pandemic