India closes the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games fourth, with 21 golds and 85 medals

India left the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games on Sunday in fourth place, with 21 gold, 27 silver and 37 bronze, 85 medals in all. The closing ceremony at Nagoya ran 90 minutes. Trap shooter Neeru Dhanda, who won two golds and a silver at these Games, carried the flag. About 30 Indian athletes and officials, in white and blue, walked in the athletes' parade.

The table above India was unchanged in order from recent editions and wider in gold. China finished first for a 12th straight Asian Games, with 169 gold, 89 silver and 83 bronze, 341 medals, its largest haul at a Games held outside China, Mathrubhumi reported. Host Japan was second with 83 gold, 95 silver and 91 bronze, 269 medals. South Korea was third with 39 gold, 43 silver and 68 bronze. India's 21 golds left a gap of 18 to Korea and 62 to Japan.

The Indian total is 22 medals and 7 golds short of Hangzhou in 2023, where the count was 28 gold, 38 silver and 41 bronze, 107 in all. Sportstar noted that the drop showed most clearly in athletics and shooting, the two sports that had filled the Hangzhou column. The late part of the Nagoya programme still added names that were not on the 2023 list.

Boxing produced three Indian golds: Lovlina Borgohain, Parveen Hooda and Ankush. Wrestling produced two. Sujeet took the men's freestyle 65 kilogram title. Olympic medallist Aman Sehrawat added the men's freestyle 57 kilogram gold. Dhanda's two trap golds and one silver made her the flag-bearer for the close, a choice that tied the parade to the shooting event that still worked rather than to the shooting programme as a whole.

The ceremony used a hexagonal stage as the centre of a show built around the line "One Asia." Flag-bearers entered first, Dhanda among them, and contingents from all 45 participating countries followed. Highlight reels of the fortnight ran after the parade. The cauldron was still in place at the stadium before the ceremony began, Sportstar's live file noted on Sunday afternoon.

Fourth place with 85 medals is a clear step down from the Hangzhou total, and it is also the highest Indian gold count outside a home or near-home Games only if earlier editions are set aside. They should not be. Jakarta-Palembang in 2018 produced 15 golds. Guangzhou in 2010 produced 14. Hangzhou remains the outlier. Nagoya sits between that outlier and the earlier teens, which is a more useful comparison than a single sentence about a "high" or a "disappointment."

The missing golds were concentrated. Sportstar's file said athletics and shooting supplied fewer titles than in China. Boxing and wrestling did not. A planning question for the next cycle, which runs toward the Asian Games in Doha, is whether the athletics and shooting drop was entries, finals reached, or finals lost. The published medal table does not split those three. It only records the titles that were won: 21, against 28 three years ago.

China's 169 golds, more than the next two nations combined, set the other scale. Japan, as host, still finished 62 golds ahead of India. The Indian column of 21 gold, 27 silver and 37 bronze is the number the sports ministry and the federations will have to explain event by event. The ceremony itself closed the Games. The count is what travels home.