We're India fans, not sports fans (and it's ok)
athletes with awe, to catch a glimpse of citius, altius, forties and all that stuffius. We follow the Olympics to do INDIAAAA-INDIA! And in the process if we catch something that is sportingly wonderful, well, we get lucky, whether we know it or not.
Let's face it, despite the once-in-four years suppressed supply-heightened demand coverage, the Olympics as a spectator sporting event isn't as popular in this day and age of multiple fan loyalty as 'viewership' would suggest. In football, for instance, there was a time when the Indian football fan was content following the national team — and his local club, if he was Malayali, Bengali or Punjabi.
Other sports that Indian fans followed were hockey and cricket — the former represented almost solely by the national squad, the latter overwhelmingly by the Indian team, and for more serious enthusiasts of the game, by national tournaments like the Ranji Trophy. The nation was pretty much the only side we had to follow.
Cricket castled that arrangement with IPL. While the national side remained the, well, national favourite, regional loyalty mimicked nation-cheering on a smaller scale. While cricket, even in the pre-IPL era, gathered enough critical mass of enthusiasts who could appreciate not just 'our' Gundappa Viswanath's square cut, but also 'their' Imran Khan's reverse swing — and weren't just interested in 'India winning' — all other sports, whether badminton with Prakash Padukone, or billiards with Geet Sethi, or athletics with PT Usha, or hockey, was all about
