Sonipat’s golden harvest: How Haryana city became India’s medal factory

When Kushal Dalal picked up boxing gloves, his family didn’t say no. When he gave that up and decided on archery – because Kushal didn’t like the idea of hitting anyone and felt at home in “a peaceful sport” – they agreed to that, too.

There was no place around to practise archery, so a section of the family’s 5-acre farmland at Siwanka village in Sonipat was cleared. Paddy straw was woven to give him targets.Village gossip had brought Kiran Pahal’s running days to an abrupt end. After talk of Kiran “speaking to a boy” reached her father, he stopped her from going out. He relented after Kiran went on a hunger strike. Her grandmother used money from her pension to buy her a pair of running shoes.Before Neha Goyal played hockey for India, she helped her mother and sisters fix bicycles. Neha was eight when a friend told her hockey players got free shoes, clothes and notebooks. Her mother, who worked in houses and at a foam factory, didn’t stop her from playing.At the recently concluded Asian Games in Japan’s Aichi-Nagoya, a neighbour of Delhi reaped possibly India’s biggest harvest for a single city. Each of these stories – and 10 more like these – culminated in a gold medal.

Each began, and blossomed, in Sonipat.Though in NCR, Sonipat doesn’t have Delhi’s influence, Gurgaon’s money or Noida’s infrastructure. As a manufacturing hub of auto components and ancillaries that are used in the domestic market and abroad, Sonipat has so far been writing its script, literally, in parts.Sport, which bubbles in its DNA, works much in the same way – many individual parts that don’t get to show their prowess as a sum.

Aichi-Nagoya was that rare instance when they did. Serendipity? Perhaps. Organisation? Possible. Talent? Certainly.But talent needs spotting. And for virtually all the gold medallists, that was someone in the family who made it possible, sometimes with a push, sometimes with a quiet sacrifice –a family clearing land, a grandmother spending her pension, a mother working to buy shoes, a coach paying school fees for a stranger’s daughter.The other aspect of the Japan feat that places Sonipat apart from traditional sporting nurseries like Bhiwani (boxing) is the diversity of the 13 (individual and team combined) gold medals that athletes from here won, across disciplines like hockey, archery, kabaddi, athletics and wrestling.

Serendipity did play a part. For several of these medallists, sport wasn’t the original dream. Neha Goyal, midfielder in the gold-winning women’s hockey team, started going for hockey classes after a friend told her hockey players received free shoes, clothes and notebooks.

She joined because her family needed those things. Some families saw sport as a way to support the child’s education; others came to see it as a route eventually to a govt job.Coaches TOI spoke to said access to proper training remains the difference between a talent lost and a talent realised. Sonipat’s sportspersons have certainly benefited from its concentration of sports institutions and training centres around Rai and Bahalgarh. It has a Sports Authority of India (SAI) National Centre of Excellence, a residential sports school and Sports University of Haryana. The SAI centre covers 83 acres and its listed facilities include a 70-metre archery field, a floodlit synthetic athletics track, synthetic hockey fields, two mud kabaddi courts, wrestling halls, a sports injury and rehabilitation centre, a hypoxic chamber and hostels.Motilal Nehru School of Sports at Rai, founded by Haryana govt in 1973, has athletics, archery, weightlifting, wrestling and swimming among its competencies.Village akharas, kabaddi nurseries and private academies sit in different parts of the access route. One such academy, run by former India hockey captain Pritam Rani Siwach and her husband, has produced a steady stream of national hockey players. Seven hockey players from Sonipat were part of the men’s and women’s Indian teams that won gold at Aichi-Nagoya: four women and three men.

All four women and one in the men’s team (Pritam Rani’s son Yashdeep) trained at the academy, which now has around 200 players, 150 of them girls.Among the youngest there is Ritika. The five-year-old is still mastering her numbers and alphabets in school but is quickly picking up dribbling and promptly agreed to show this reporter the right grip for the hockey stick. “Aise pakadte hain. Aur phir ball ko goal mein daalna hota hai.

Jo ball andar daalega, woh jeetega! (this is how you hols the stick. The objective is to score a goal with the ball. Whoever does that wins)” she said.When Pritam Rani started the academy in 2004, she had seven trainees. When the academy paid school fees and helped buy shoes and other equipment, more began to join. I never wanted money to become the reason a talented girl stopped playing,” she told TOI. Food mattered, too.

Many girls came from families for whom milk and fruit were luxuries, so the academy began providing soaked chana, milk and bananas.

Neha, who came for the shoes, stayed for the dream – of building a house for her mother. “I did not start playing hockey thinking I wanted to play for India. I was in Class IV when a friend told me about the shoes, clothes and notebooks,” she said. “There were people who told my mother to keep me at home.

But she never stopped me.” A cash prize for being player of the match changed her attitude towards hockey. “That Rs 2,000 changed something inside me.

I started thinking if I played well, I could earn. Then on, hockey was not just a game for me. It became my responsibility,” she said.Abhishek Nain’s first reason for playing hockey was less ambitious. He was nine when he followed a classmate to a ground because it was an excuse to bunk. His father, who was with BSF, asked him to consider quitting hockey – which he was playing at the national level – after a series of injuries and focus on getting a govt job.

Coaches persuaded the family to let him continue. Years later, at Aichi-Nagoya, he would score India’s winning goal against Pakistan in the Asiad semi-final.Seeing girls running on a track outside her school drew Kiran into athletics so much that she began sprinting in her school shoes and slippers, sometimes even barefoot. “I did not know where this would take me or that I would one day be wearing the India badge. I just liked running and wanted to try.”

She joined Indian Railways in 2021, gaining financial stability after years of training. “For an athlete, knowing that there is a secure job gives a lot of confidence,” said Kiran, who won the 4x400m relay team gold in Japan.

Meenu Beniwal, president of Haryana Olympic Association, linked Sonipat’s sporting culture to shrinking landholdings and search for livelihoods beyond farming. “As ancestral landholdings have shrunk and farming has become less viable for many families, sports have emerged as an important pathway to secure govt jobs and build a better future,” she said.

Proximity to Delhi and recruitment opportunities in the Army, Railways, paramilitary forces and other central government departments have also encouraged young people to pursue sport, she felt.Sports University of Haryana vice-chancellor Ashok Kumar said ambitious parents have helped build the ecosystem by investing their own money and taking risks for their children. Institutions have added to that support, creating a baseline sporting infrastructure framework in the city. The university admits 1,000-plus students each year, and Sonipat accounts for around 20% of admissions.Kabaddi player Pardeep Narwal says children in villages such as Rindhana grow up watching neighbours, relatives and seniors succeed in the sport. Local grounds and kabaddi academies run by former players bring large numbers of youngsters into the sport. In Rindhana alone, around 300 children practise across three grounds, he said.

“From my village alone 25-30 athletes have played in Pro Kabaddi League,” Narwal said.

Seeing other athletes succeed encourages more children in the village to try. “Family members motivate the kids. They look at a neighbour’s son succeeding and ask their own children why they can’t do the same,” he said.Wrestler Naveen Mor describes the same process in akharas, with local dangals giving children competitive experience early. “When an entire community encourages a sport, the chances of producing champions naturally increase,” said Mor, who runs a wrestling academy on a one-acre plot near Murthal, where he trains 70-80 children.

He said he does not charge them because talent may emerge from families unable to afford expensive coaching.“Many of our athletes come from humble farming families, where children grow up helping with physical work and learn discipline, endurance and the value of hard work early in life. Wrestling also offered generations of youngsters from middle-class families a way to build a career, earn recognition and secure a govt job.

Earlier, choices for many such families were limited, and sports became a route to a better future.

Over time, this created a strong sporting culture, with akharas, coaches, families and former wrestlers all contributing to the next generation,” Mor said.The same may now be happening for hockey and athletics. Maybe, it takes a village to keep producing gold medallists.

Sonipat’s Gold Medal Winners [13]Women’s HockeyNeha GoyalJyotiSakshi RanaShilpi DabasMen’s HockeySumitAbhishek NainYashdeep SiwachAthleticsKiran PahalArcheryKushal DalalKabaddiSunil KumarAshu MalikRajraniWrestlingSujeet Kalkal