In the land of vultures: What happened when Kota won its 1st CWG gold medal
No one wants to be a part of supporting an athlete, but everyone wants to celebrate one. It could not be truer in the case
No one wants to be a part of supporting an athlete, but everyone wants to celebrate one. It could not be truer in the case of Arundhati Choudhary from Kota, who returned home to much fanfare after winning a gold medal in her maiden Commonwealth Games appearance. Arundhati was part of a dominant 14-member Indian boxing contingent that returned with 10 medals, including seven golds. Six of those gold medallists hailed from Haryana - India’s undisputed combat sports nursery, a state with an established, well-oiled machinery for producing elite champions. Read Full Story The lone outlier was Arundhati, born in Kota - a city famous not for ring champions, but for IIT exam factories. Indian boxers who won gold medal at CWG 2026. (PTI Photo) Since the early 2000s, Kota’s entire economy has been engineered around a single pursuit: clearing IIT exams. After the boom of Bansal Classes, mega-coaching franchises like Allen, Career Point, Resonance, and Rao Academy sold middle-class India a non-negotiable dream. “Come to Kota if you want to get into the IITs.” Hostels, PGs, mess halls, gaming parlours, and shopping complexes grew systematically around keeping thousands of stressed teenagers inside a hyper-competitive bubble. The machinery was so lucrative for local administrators and business owners that no one ever bothered to build anything else. That Arundhati emerged from this conservative, academic pressure cooker to dominate international sports is a miracle born out of pure defiance. But on Friday, the very city that offered her zero sports infrastructure opened its arms to claim her glory. Her house, situated on the outskirts of Kota, became a buzzing place on Friday. Relatives, neighbours and local politicians lined up to congratulate her and, inevitably, a photograph. Some of these were the same people who had perhaps not been particularly encouraging when her father, Suresh Choudhary, gave his daughter the freedom to pursue sport in Kota. People circle success very quickly. They are less willing to stand beside it while it is still trying to become successful. But this is not a story about Kota's coaching classes or its economy. It is about how India treats athletes like Arundhati, before and after they earn the gold medal. AUGUST 5 A knackered Arundhati Choudhary and her family arrived early in the morning at Jaipur airport. By then, she had become a sensation in Rajasthan for becoming the state's first boxer to win a Commonwealth Games gold medal. The family had expected someone from the sports federation to greet them at the airport. Nobody came. Family members living close to Jaipur and local media representatives were there to receive them. During the interviews, Arundhati was asked about the support from the state government and what had been done to enable her journey. The 23-year-old, still far from media-trained, did not hide her disappointment.
The BriefWire