Talent is rarely the scarce resource in sport. The system capable of finding, developing and retaining it usually is.
A country may organize thousands of school competitions, build academies and identify talented children. But unless those initiatives form a connected pathway, the best athletes still depend too heavily on geography, personal networks, family resources or chance.
The same applies higher up the system. Talent identification without qualified coaching creates a bottleneck. Good coaching without sports science limits performance. Elite services without appropriate competition leave athletes under-tested. And substantial investment without measurable international progress raises a more uncomfortable question: is the system producing activity, or converting potential into performance?
India provides a particularly relevant case.
Khelo India was launched to connect participation, competition, talent identification and athlete development across a country of more than 1.4 billion people. By July 2026, the government reported 1,067 Khelo India Centers, 267 supported academies and 2,745 Khelo India Athletes receiving coaching, equipment, medical support and allowances. A newly expanded Khelo India framework and enhanced support for National Sports Federations have now been approved with a combined 36,441 crore rupees, more than $4 billion, of investment for 2026/27 to 2030/31.
The scale is significant. But scale alone is not a high-performance system.
Four questions determine whether a country is truly converting talent into international success:
Does talent move through one structured pathway, or between disconnected programs?
Are coaches developed as systematically as the athletes they are expected to develop?
Does multidisciplinary support follow athletes as they progress toward elite performance?
Is the system consistently converting investment and talent into international results?
India increasingly has answers to all four. The more difficult question is how consistently they work across sports, regions and levels of performance.
A thousand centers do not make a pathway
One of the most common weaknesses in developing sports systems is not the absence of initiatives. It is the absence of connections between them.
A school may identify a talented child. A district center may provide coaching. A federation may operate a junior national team. A private academy may offer better facilities. A national high-performance center may provide elite support.
But unless there is a defined mechanism for moving athletes between those levels, each institution can perform its own role while the athlete still falls through the gaps.
Khelo India was designed partly to address this problem. The original district-level model envisaged 1,000 Khelo India Centers, ideally using former champion athletes as coaches and mentors. The objective was to make local training available while creating a bridge between grassroots participation and more structured athlete development. That target has since been exceeded in terms of centers established.
The architecture has become increasingly sophisticated. Khelo India now combines local centers, State Centers of Excellence, accredited academies, Sports Authority of India training centers and National Centers of Excellence. The Khelo India Rising Talent Identification program, KIRTI, adds a more systematic identification layer for athletes aged 9 to 18. By 2026, government reporting cited 174 Talent Assessment Centers and more than 187,000 completed assessments, using standardized protocols, digital tools and data analytics.
At the other end of the pathway, the Target Olympic Podium Scheme, TOPS, provides customized support to athletes considered capable of Olympic and Paralympic success.
Conceptually, the pathway is becoming clearer:
The revamped Khelo India model approved in 2026 explicitly aims to connect these stages more closely, bringing together Khelo India Centers, accredited academies, SAI Training Centers, Centers of Excellence and other institutions within a more integrated development pathway. That is an important evolution.
But the maturity test is not whether every level exists on an organizational chart. It is whether athletes reliably progress between them.
For each priority sport, a leading system should know:
How does talent enter the pathway?
What determines progression to the next level?
How are selection decisions made?
Which competitions athletes should reach at each stage?
What happens to late developers?
How do women and Para athletes enter equivalent pathways?
How many athletes actually convert from one stage to the next?
That last point matters most. A country can count 1,000 centers. It can count 100,000 assessments. It can count thousands of identified athletes.
The more valuable KPI is the conversion rate between levels: How many locally identified athletes reach an accredited academy? How many academy athletes progress into national centers? How many juniors become internationally competitive seniors?
A pathway is not defined by the number of doors into it. It is defined by how reliably athletes move through them.
Talent develops at the speed of its coaches
Facilities do not develop athletes. Coaches do. That makes coaching one of the most consequential, and frequently underestimated, constraints in national high-performance systems.
India’s Khelo India Center model has an interesting feature: it deliberately brings former champion athletes back into the system as coaches and mentors. This retains sporting knowledge while also creating post-career opportunities for athletes.
By 2026, government reporting cited 992 Past Champion Athletes engaged as coaches and mentors across the network, with more than 28,000 athletes training at the centers they serve. A dedicated capacity-building program in sports coaching at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala supports the transition, converting elite playing careers into coaching credentials through structured residential courses.
This is a pragmatic solution to a significant scale challenge. But elite playing experience and elite coaching competence are not the same thing.
A former international athlete may understand competition instinctively while still requiring education in pedagogy, athlete development, periodization, sports science, safeguarding, communication and performance analysis.
India’s Khelo Bharat Niti 2025 recognizes this explicitly. The policy calls for continuous coach development through training and certification, national and international programs, workshops and online learning, alongside greater integration of sports science, technology and data analytics into coaching curricula.
That is directionally strong. The next maturity step is consistency.
A leading coaching system should be able to answer:
What competency level is required at each stage of the athlete pathway?
What percentage of pathway coaches meet that standard?
How frequently are coaches re-certified?
Are coaching outcomes assessed as well as qualifications?
Are the best coaches concentrated at elite level, or also developing athletes earlier in the pathway?
Is coach development consistent across priority sports and regions?
This is particularly important because the quality of the pathway is constrained by its weakest coaching stage.
An outstanding national-team coach cannot fully compensate for technical deficiencies created ten years earlier.
Countries do not only need more coaches. They need the right coach, with the right competencies, at the right stage of development.
The athlete should not have to assemble the support system
As athletes move toward international performance, coaching alone is no longer enough.
Modern high performance requires coordinated access to medicine, physiotherapy, strength and conditioning, nutrition, psychology, biomechanics, physiology, performance analysis and recovery.
India has invested significantly in this layer.
The Sports Authority of India operates 24 National Centers of Excellence across 24 disciplines, with sanctioned capacity for more than 4,800 athletes, supported by high-performance infrastructure and sports-science capabilities.
The intended multidisciplinary model includes: sports medicine and physiotherapy, strength and conditioning, anthropometry and biomechanics, physiology and biochemistry, psychology, nutrition and performance analysis.
At the very top of the pathway, TOPS adds another layer of individualized assistance. As of April 2026, TOPS supported 51 Core athletes, 52 Para Core athletes and 130 Development athletes. Core athletes can receive customized support for foreign training, international competition, coaching camps and specialist equipment, alongside a monthly out-of-pocket allowance of 50,000 rupees, approximately $560. The Development Group provides earlier-stage support for athletes considered potential future podium contenders.
The architecture increasingly resembles leading high-performance systems. But here again, the critical maturity question is coverage and integration, not existence. If multidisciplinary services are available only to athletes who reach a particular national center, the pathway still contains gaps. If a physiotherapist, psychologist, nutritionist and coach each support the athlete without sharing information, the system is multidisciplinary in name but fragmented in practice.
Leading systems move from providing services to managing the athlete as one integrated performance case. That requires shared performance plans, coordinated medical and coaching decisions, accessible athlete data and clearly defined responsibility for athlete welfare. It also means supporting the whole athlete.
Performance systems increasingly recognize that education, mental health, safeguarding, financial stability, career planning and transition out of elite sport affect both performance and welfare. India’s national sports policy now explicitly embraces holistic, athlete-centric support across the stages of an athlete’s career.
The benchmark should therefore not simply be: Do we have sports scientists? It should be:
What proportion of priority athletes receive coordinated multidisciplinary support, and does that support follow them throughout the pathway?
The podium is the final conversion test
High-performance systems ultimately have to produce high performance. India’s results show substantial progress, but also why the distinction between a developing and a leading system matters.
At the Olympic Games, India improved from two medals at Rio 2016 to seven at Tokyo 2020, before winning six at Paris 2024. That represents a clear improvement from the pre-Tokyo level, but not yet consistent progression from one Olympic cycle to the next.
The Asian Games provide stronger evidence of breadth. India progressed from 57 medals in 2014 to 69 in 2018, a total later revised to 70 after doping disqualifications, and a record 107 at Hangzhou 2023, including 28 gold medals. Government reporting indicates that 124 Khelo India Athletes competed in Hangzhou and collectively contributed 42 medals, including nine golds.
The most dramatic improvement has come in Para sport. India won four Paralympic medals at Rio 2016, 19 at Tokyo 2020 and 29 at Paris 2024. Twenty-five Khelo India Athletes were part of the 84-member Paris Paralympic team and five won medals.
These trends suggest that targeted programs are increasingly contributing athletes capable of reaching international level. But they also reveal the next challenge.
A country of India’s scale should not evaluate a pathway only through absolute medal totals. The more revealing measures include:
Medals and finalists per athlete entered
Number of sports producing internationally competitive athletes
Repeat medalists across Olympic cycles
Junior-to-senior conversion rates
Performances relative to identified priority sports
Progress by women and Para athletes
The proportion of international success produced through the formal national pathway
This is especially important as India’s ambition rises. The country’s policy direction now targets becoming a top-ten sporting nation by 2036 and a top-five sporting nation by 2047. The expanded Khelo India and federation-support framework approved in 2026 represents a major increase in resources to pursue that objective.
The next phase therefore cannot be measured primarily by how many new centers, academies or athletes enter the system. It must be measured by conversion.
India has demonstrated that it can build scale. Its Paralympic and Asian Games performances suggest that parts of the system are converting that scale increasingly well. The Olympic results show that the conversion is not yet consistent enough to call the overall system leading. That is precisely why India is such a useful benchmark for emerging sports nations.
It demonstrates the difference between building the components of a high-performance system and making those components perform as one system.
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Power Insight.
Where Talent Systems Break
Programs exist, pathways do not. Schools, academies, federations and national teams all operate, but athletes depend on chance to move between them.
Identification is mistaken for development. Thousands of children are tested and selected, but progression rates are not tracked through the full pathway.
Playing experience is mistaken for coaching competence. Former athletes bring valuable expertise, but successful coaching requires its own standards, education and continuous development.
Athletes assemble their own support teams. Medical, scientific and psychological services exist, but access and coordination depend on the institution or athlete.
Investment is measured before conversion. Centers, athletes and programs are easy to count. Internationally competitive athletes are much harder to produce.
What Strong Systems Do Differently
Design the pathway backwards from the podium. Define the performance level required internationally, then establish the progression stages, competition standards and selection criteria required to reach it.
Measure conversion at every stage. Track how many identified athletes progress from local training to academies, national centers, senior teams and international competition.
Develop coaches as deliberately as athletes. Set competency standards by pathway stage, require continuous education and assess coaching performance rather than qualifications alone.
Make athlete support integrated and portable. Medicine, physiotherapy, nutrition, psychology and performance science should operate around the athlete and remain connected as the athlete moves through the system.
Judge the system by repeatable outcomes. One medal can come from exceptional talent. A functioning system produces finalists, medals and international-level athletes repeatedly across sports and cycles.
The article series and engagement is led by Marc Esterer, Director Business Development, and Alexander Strulak, Strategic Partnerships Advisor & Communications Manager.
A note on process: AI tools were used to support parts of the research, data visualisation and editorial refinement of this article. The analysis draws on the studies and sources listed below.
Sources: Union Cabinet / Press Information Bureau (Revamped Khelo India Scheme and Enhanced Assistance to National Sports Federations, July 2026); Press Information Bureau (Khelo India, National Programme for Development of Sports, 2026; India’s Sporting Transformation, 2026); Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (Khelo Bharat Niti 2025); Press Information Bureau (KIRTI launch and Talent Assessment Centre reporting, 2024-2026); Sports Authority of India (Target Olympic Podium Scheme; National Centres of Excellence); Press Information Bureau and parliamentary replies (Khelo India Athletes at the Asian Games and Paralympic Games, 2024-2025); official Olympic, Paralympic and Asian Games records, 2014-2024.
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
