Sad that his success will be overshadowed by Cricket.
Honestly feel sorry for Indian athletes.
In Turkey the same problem its always football, football and fcking football again. Dont get me wrong I love both sports just dont like how a nation just focuses on one sport while ignoring the rest.
It used to be more the case before....its changing now...slowly, but slow is better than nothing.
Take just wrestling for example.
I was looking at India in formative time I grew up in.....and they would send like a cpl of guys and come back with zilch. They got next to no coverage on anything, whatever their efforts were. Little to no star or staying power to take forward past their local environs at best.
It is far cry now post-Dangal. A good 6 or so are sent and they come back with some medals regularly now....and they build up their process in other competitions and the domestic league etc.
In fact we were unlucky not to get a cpl more golds here in wrestling this time....bajrang had a recent knee injury and ravi recently dropped lot of weight to meet criteria for the weight class (that affected his fitness in the final to have chance against that monster+quick dagestani russian....who was excellent to watch). Both could have been golds instead of silver and bronze.
Anyway, In the end it is about capturing enough imagination and ethos of the larger country.
Cricket did so for number of reasons which will be long conversation of its own.....but for population this size and diverse it cannot sustainably occupy that mantle to the degree it once enjoyed. In fact Cricket itself is changing drastically in its representation from across the board, it is turning less elitist than it once was.
Wrestling, Badminton and other sports are moving into this space more and more.I see good things for field hockey moving forward now that the 40 year total parched period (at olympics) is over.
We need to better and keep at improving the leagues generating the interest for these sports....and more will come with time to take even more space that cricket holds now.
It will be harder to do with things like athletics, shooting, swimming etc (which need far more state support from beginning to end of ppl career), as the roster for these is much more top-down in meets for competitions. i.e you literally need large (but infrequent) games to attract interest compared to league-friendly sports.
That is where the massive statist support in other countries like US and PRC has kicked in (for very long time now) and produce reliable results now downstream.