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THE COMMONWEALTH GAMES WERE DELHI'S AND INDIA'S BIGGEST sporting event ever. As the shiny promise of hosting them enveloped Delhi, questions loomed-large, unasked, and ominous: Who would emerge the winner in the contest to present Delhi as a global city? Would Indian sports gain at all? How much was it costing the person on the street? Who would actually benefit from all the digging and window dressing? And did the average Indian, some forcibly resettled to facilitate Games construction, lose materially?
This paper sets out to analyze the story of the Games' legacy- their politics, economic impact, and to what extent they were successful in transforming Delhi into a global city and India into a sporting force to reckon with. It starts from the premise that the Commonwealth Games (CWG) had the potential to create conditions for the building of a "culture of winning" in India, measured in terms of gold medals won and state status earned in front of the international sports fraternity. This '"winning culture'" is fundamentally different from an already existent sports culture in the country in such sports as kabaddi, gullidanda, and other street sports and games, which are alive and vibrant in spite of very little national or global recognition.
It is essential to declare at the outset that two fundamental motives lie at the heart of this project. The first is the determination to contribute to the growing corpus of research on Indian sport, a subject area still somewhat underdeveloped. The second is to understand the Indian sporting story against the backdrop of what is happening inside a nation trying to establish its postcolonial identity in the world. The thread running through the paper is the politicized nature of India's Commonwealth Games experience. The CWG story, the paper demonstrates, is also a story of Indian politics, of power equations, and the failure to professionalize Olympic sports vis-à-vis cricket in India.
Having already documented the history and politics of the Commonwealth Games with a focus on Delhi (Majumdar and Mehta 2010), this paper instead tries to place Delhi 2010 in perspective, understand its long term meaning, and explain its lasting legacy.
PRE-GAMES FEARS
While the Games Organizing Committee and the politicians continued to be hopeful with just days to go...