RIO Mere Lal

Rio Olympics has begun in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Brazil is famous for its carnivals and this is the biggest carnival for athletes. 207 nations and 11000+ athletes are competing in this year’s Olympics. This is the thirty first edition of Olympic games. It is a seventeen day event and Brazil is going to make history with this. There were protests in Brazil against the hosting of the games but it gave way to pageantry night at the Maracana Stadium. Opening ceremony at Brazil pointed towards the greener future with an promise of athletes’ forest to be planted after the games. In that forest, a plant will be planted by each athlete. So around 11000 trees will be planted in Athletes’ forest. Despite of a budget one-tenth the size of the equivalent in London four years ago, Brazil put on a great show.

Abhinav Bindra led the Indian contingent in the opening ceremony. The flag bearer Abhinav Bindra is the first and only Indian to win an individual gold medal in Olympic games. India has won 9 gold medals in 30 Olympic games so far and out of that 8 gold medals has been won by our hockey team in the past. After that golden era of Indian hockey in Olympics, we craved for gold medal in Olympics for a long long time. It was like people waiting for rain in desert. The wait finally ended when Abhinav Bindra won an individual gold in 10m air rifle shooting in 2008. It was a big boost for Indian athletes.

After that there has been rise of these sports in Indian but we haven’t won any gold in Olympics. In 2012 London Olympics, lot of athletes went closer to the gold but none of them won it. This year 120+ athletes from India are going to compete in 15 sports. This is India’s largest ever delegation in summer olympic history. In 2012 Olympics, Indian Olympic Association has sent 83 athletes. Hence hopes are really high this time. These hopes has been built by the promise Indian players have shown in the recent time by their performances. Our players have been performing well in common wealth games, Asian games and world championships.

Our athletes were not known to us earlier because they hardly used to win any medal in any games. These days all of them are lot more famous because they have done pretty well in the recent world events. Moreover lots of leagues have been started in our country to promote these kind of sports. Thus in this Olympics, we are expecting medals specially gold medals from the sports like Archery, Badminton, Boxing, Wrestling, Shooting, Gymnastics and Weightlifting. If we go by the recent trend then in every world event like olympics, common wealth games and asian games someone who is not known to us, rise up and surprise us with his performance and bring a medal in our country. For example, no one expected that Abhinav Bindra will win the gold in 2008. All the expectations were from Gagan Narang. No one expected that Sushil Kumar will win a silver medal in Wrestling.

This time most of the athletes have experience and hopefully the trend of rising up and surprising will also continue. So hopefully a lot more medals will come here from Brazil. And hopefully maximum of our athletes will give us the opportunity to say them RIO Mere Lal Rio.