Neha Aggarwal, Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ) chief partnerships officer and a table tennis Olympian
In 2001, sports legends Prakash Padukone and Geet Sethi set up the Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ), a not-for-profit foundation to scout promising athletes and support them in their quest for medals in the Olympic Games. In 2008, a year after it started active operations, OGQ sent a sole athlete—shooter Gagan Narang—to the Beijing Games. Cut to 2024, and 49 OGQ-supported athletes made it to the Paris Olympics. Four of them returned with a medal. In the Paralympics that followed soon after, there were 54 OGQ-supported athletes and 25 medal winners. How did OGQ build up the ecosystem for Olympic sports in India? Neha Aggarwal, its chief partnerships officer and a table tennis Olympian herself, discusses on an episode on the Sports UnLtd podcast. Edited excerpts from the conversation:
Q. To set the context, why was OGQ founded?
OGQ was co-founded by our Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone with a very sharp mission to help Indian athletes win Olympic gold medals. We added the Paralympics as well in 2019. When we started, it was a deep belief by both Sethi and Padukone that Indian athletes needed customised support back then, they needed interventions at various levels to ensure they were training at world-class levels. So OGQ supports athletes in various aspects, including coaching, equipment, going for international and national training. We have a very good sports science team which includes physiotherapists, nutritionists, fitness trainers, mental trainers, all working 24/7 behind the athletes in their locations, with their surgeries, injury, rehab, everything, We currently work with 10 sporting categories out of which five—badminton, boxing, shooting, archery and wrestling—are our priority sports.
Q. Take us through OGQ’s selection procedure. What are the filters and the parameters that you apply when you select an athlete like PV Sindhu, Manu Bhaker, Lakshya Sen?
We have a very good research team that is tracking athletes in the sports we are in and other sports as well at various levels. At under-12, under-14, under-17 categories, we are looking at tournaments at district-, state- and national-level championships. We analyse these performances over a period of time. We also have, over the years, built a very robust network of scouts, who are the coaches at the grassroots level, who are our eyes and ears and tell us the right athletes to support. We also have various sports experts who then help us identify the talented athletes and who should be supported at what time.
For example, Prakash sir himself spotted Lakshya Sen when he was only 10. He hailed from Almora and we brought him down to Bengaluru and set up his entire training base at the PPBA (Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy). Similarly, we started supporting PV Sindhu when she was only 14, before Sindhu became Sindhu. At that time, we asked her what she needed and her coaches, family unequivocally said exposure for international tournaments, especially at the senior level. That’s where Sindhu won her first international tournament, the Maldives Open, and it helped her senior career take flight. Selection of athletes is super critical and, even more, monitoring. If athletes don’t meet the targets we have set for them, we have to take the hard call of weeding them out. On an average, we weed out 8-10 athletes every year.
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Q. How critical are AI and technology and data for the selection and monitoring of athletes?
At OGQ, we lay equal importance on soft skills. While data tells us how a particular athlete at a certain age compares to world standards, and where s/he will reach at the peak age of performance, I think the other most important element is the softer aspect—the hunger for excellence and the ability to work towards it. We are not looking for athletes who are satisfied just winning the national championships or the Commonwealth Games or the Asian Games. We want to support athletes who have the mission and the vision to win medals at the Olympics. It’s very critical to understand those factors as well and then give them the full-fledged support. Because once we start supporting an athlete, it’s a long-term journey—we’d like to support the athlete for at least one Olympic cycle. So, I’d say you top up data with the softer aspects and what the sports experts are saying.
Aman Sehrawat, an Olympian freestyle wrestler and Neha Aggarwal
Q. Talk us through some of your most successful picks.
Just in terms of some numbers, India in the last four Olympics has won a total of 21 medals and the training of 13 of them was supported by OGQ. Recently, at the Paris Olympics, India won six medals; five of them were in individual sports out of which four—Manu Bhaker, Sarabjot Singh, Swapnil Kusale and Aman Sehrawat—were supported by OGQ. We are also super proud of our para-athletes at the Paris Paralympics. Just to give you context, India won only four medals at the Rio 2016 Paralympics; in 2021, India won 19 medals out of which 10 athletes were supported by OGQ. And now, in Paris, India has had its best-ever Paralympics medals haul with 29 medals, out of which 25 medal winners were supported by OGQ.
Before I get to any success stories, I do want to say that it all has been possible because of various stakeholders that have come together and built the ecosystem in a way in which the athlete is best supported. We work very closely with the government, the Sports Authority of India, the Target Olympic Podium Scheme, national sports federations. And I think Tokyo and Paris are both Olympic and Paralympic cycles that have been a classic example of what can happen when all the stakeholders come together.
One of OGQ’s biggest success stories is, of course, PV Sindhu, whom we started supporting in 2009. It was also in 2009 that we started supporting boxing legend Mary Kom. At that time, women’s boxing was introduced for the 2012 London Olympics, where she won bronze, and I remember, back then, we got a foreign coach, set up a full-fledged training camp for Mary in Pune, got a few sparring partners and set up her base in Pune to train for 2012. Very recently, Aman Sehrawat is a product of our junior scholarship programme wherein we support athletes from the age group of 11 to 19. It’s been our absolute honour to support Sheetal Devi, the world’s first female, armless archer—we’ve been supporting her for the last three years. Avani Lekhara and Navdeep Singh are two Paralympic gold-medallists whom we’ve been supporting, besides Mariyappan Thangavelu, now a three-time Paralympic medal winner.
It’s a golden period to be an athlete in India. If you are talented, if you have the ability to work hard and towards excellence, you will be supported.
Q. Can you give us a sense of how fundraising has evolved from the time OGQ started to now?
I’d like to start with a story of Geet Sethi where he says that from 2001, when he and Padukone co-founded OGQ, till 2006, they could not raise a single rupee. In 2007, they met Shitin Desai, the former chairman of DSP Merrill Lynch, and he was the first donor of OGQ. After that R Ramaraj, former Sify and Sequoia, became the second donor. That was the time when OGQ got up and running. Since then, I’m delighted to see the sort of support that OGQ has now received from corporate India. About 65 percent of our total funding comes from our corporates through CSR. The 2013 CSR law was a gamechanger and sports was added in the list of causes to support. A lot of folks from the corporate world, HNIs and individuals are supporting OGQ and I feel it is now time where even the perception of folks towards sport is changing. From one athlete back in 2008, we are now close to 400 athletes.
Q. We’ve just completed one Olympic cycle and the next one is about to begin. What’s the road map for OGQ for LA28?
If you analyse the performance of Paris 2024, India won six medals, and had six 4th position finishes. There were 2 boxers who lost in the quarterfinals; if they made it to the semis, another two bronze medals would have been assured. And, of course, one miss was Vinesh Phogat. So there were a total of 15 chances for India to win medals and we converted six. I think this was an Olympic of missed opportunities. We should win many more medals. One of our biggest aims is to convert from being a medal-probable candidate to winning one. That requires again a lot of work, getting better inch by inch, one by one in various aspects. That’s the key work that we need to do. We already have in the programme the athletes that we know will hold medal potential for LA28. And it’s not that we’re waking up to them, we’ve scouted them two years ago. Now the challenge is for conversion.