Off-side: Asian Games offers a window into Asia, one sport at a time

So close: India’s Quimcy Dsouza controls the ball during the women’s singles bronze-medal teqball match against Japan’s Yuina Sakamoto. The Indian lost the match and finished fourth. | Photo Credit: AP

At some ungodly hour this week, an Indian was trying to win a medal at the Asian Games by keeping a football alive on a carved table. And suddenly, this was important enough to lose sleep.

Until Quimcy Dsouza began her run at Aichi-Nagoya, teqball occupied precisely zero space in most Indian sporting conversations. Then she came within a match of a medal and the whole country was learning its rules, watching its strange geometry.

For the uninitiated — which, until a few days ago, included most of us — imagine somebody looked at a table-tennis table, bent it from the middle, removed the bats, brought out a football and decided that the resulting contraption should become an international sport.

There are rules, of course. Players can use their feet, head, chest and other football-legal parts of the body, but not their hands or arms. You can’t use the same body part twice in a row, and you must return the ball after a maximum of three touches. The curved table does the rest, producing rebounds that demand the touch of a footballer, the reactions of a table-tennis player and, occasionally, the flexibility of a gymnast.

Quimcy had once been a middle-distance runner and then a footballer. She discovered teqball only in 2022, while recovering from a ligament injury, after seeing Ronaldinho playing it on Instagram. Four years later, she was at the Asian Games, reaching the semifinals and eventually finishing fourth after losing the bronze-medal match to Japan’s Yuina Sakamoto.

This is the beauty of the Asian Games.

The Olympics give us the great universal sporting pursuits. The Asian Games give us those too, but it also opens another door into the sporting imagination of an entire continent.

This year, it has introduced mixed martial arts, padel, surfing, virtual taekwondo, BMX freestyle and teqball among its new sports. MMA brought India an immediate piece of history through Suchika Tariyal, the 36-year-old who won bronze in the women’s traditional 60kg category.

There is also sepak takraw, one of those sports that makes you question everything that you have learned about gravity.

The simplest description is volleyball played largely with the feet. A small synthetic or rattan ball must be sent across a net without the use of the hands, which sounds reasonable enough until players start launching themselves into the air, twisting almost horizontally and smashing the ball over the net with overhead bicycle kicks.

It is a sport deeply rooted in Southeast Asia and has been on the Asian Games programme since 1990. To preserve such regional identities, the Olympic Council of Asia’s five zones nominated sepak takraw representing Southeast Asia, kabaddi South Asia, wushu East Asia, kurash Central Asia and jiu-jitsu West Asia for this edition’s programme.

India has begun poorly in the men’s regu competition, but sepak takraw is no longer quite as exotic for us. The sport has developed a strong pocket of Indian talent, particularly in Manipur, with India winning gold in men’s regu at the ISTAF World Cup in 2025.

At the other end of the Asian Games universe sits esports, where athletes don’t need to be in the same room as their teammates to train.

India has 15 gamers competing across four titles — League of Legends, Pokémon UNITE, eFootball and Puyo Puyo Champions — in Japan. The six members of the League of Legends team come from places as far apart as Ernakulam, Aligarh, Delhi and Greater Noida.

Esports was only a demonstration event at Jakarta in 2018 before becoming a medal sport in Hangzhou. In China, demand was so extraordinary that esports was the only Asian Games sport for which tickets initially had to be distributed through a lottery. Reports at the time said millions applied for the chance to buy tickets for the 4,000-seat Hangzhou Esports Centre. This time there are 11 esports titles on the Asian Games programme.

This constant reinvention is hardly new.

The Asian Games has always had room for sporting curiosities. Bodybuilding has awarded Asian Games medals in 2002 and ‘06. So have cue sports (1998, 2002, ‘06 and ‘10). Ten-pin bowling survived on the programme for decades. Jet skiing and paragliding appeared in Jakarta in 2018. Pencak silat, the Indonesian martial art, had its moment there too. Dragon boat racing (2010, ‘18 and ‘22) has come and gone, as have chess and bridge. Soft tennis has also had a long association with the Asian Games.

That is why the Asian Games should never become merely an Asian version of the Olympics. Its eccentricities are its strength.

The Games are perhaps the world’s greatest sporting expression of a continent’s diversity.

Kabaddi has been India’s ambassador to the Games. It entered the medal programme in 1990, and Indian men went on to win seven consecutive gold medals. Women’s kabaddi arrived in 2010 and India won the first two titles. Only in Jakarta in 2018 was the script torn up, with Iran breaking India’s dominance. India reclaimed both men’s and women’s gold medals in Hangzhou.

This raises an intriguing question.

What else can India bring to this wonderful Asian sporting bazaar?

There is already a serious push for yogasana. The Indian Olympic Association formally sought yoga’s inclusion in the Asian Games, and the OCA subsequently moved towards recognising it as an official sport. India also has a remarkable catalogue of indigenous disciplines — mallakhamb, kalaripayattu, gatka, thang-ta, kho-kho and silambam — already being promoted through Khelo India.

Why shouldn’t some of them dream of an Asian Games future?

Imagine mallakhamb, with athletes performing extraordinary feats of strength and balance around a vertical wooden pole, before an international audience. Or kalaripayattu, one of India’s oldest martial traditions.

There will inevitably be arguments about what constitutes a sport, how widespread it must be and whether an already enormous Asian Games programme can accommodate still more events. Those are legitimate questions. Aichi-Nagoya has 43 sports and 469 medal events.

But there is something wonderfully democratic about a Games where a sport does not have to be globally ubiquitous before it is allowed to matter.

Perhaps that is the greatest charm of the Asian Games. It does not merely tell us who the best athletes in Asia are. Every four years, it opens a window onto the different cultures and sporting traditions this vast continent shelters — preserving the quirks and identities that make Asia unique in an increasingly homogenised world.

Published on Sep 23, 2026

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