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Ready, set, goals! How India’s women’s hockey team bounced back to win Gold
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The Indian women’s hockey team took the losses, weathered the trolling and came back swinging. At the Asian Games, they’ve won Gold after 44 years. Behind the comeback: Precise training, tactical rejigs and a team that learnt to have each other’s backs, on and off the field. Squad goals!
“Champion! Champion! Champion!”
After the Indian women’s hockey team defeated China 1-0 at the Asian Games this month, they had a victory dance in the locker room. The song: Champion, by Dwayne Bravo. There were shouts of joy. There were celebratory huddles. But there were barely any tears or disbelief. “Going into this tournament, our mindset was fixed from the beginning,” says captain Salima Tete, 24. “We were going for gold, not silver.”
It was an ambitious play. The last time Indian women lifted the Asian Games trophy for hockey was in 1982, when hockey was introduced at the Games. In May 2025, the 20-member team lost four out of their five matches on the Australia tour. The following month, they ended the FIH Pro League season with eight losses. They’d missed opportunities to score goals; several players had injuries; they were trolled on social media. “We were losing every match, and with it, our confidence,” recalls Tete.
This year, at the Asian Games, the women were up against some of the top teams on the continent. South Korea had put up a strong defence in the semi-finals, fighting hard until the end. In the finals, India faced off against China, the defending champions and the Paris 2024 silver Olympic medallists.
And yet they dreamed of Gold. Because they’d all been part of a determined campaign — by their coaches, support staff and the women themselves — to whip their bodies and minds back into shape. See how they turned their fate around.
Turning a corner
The Indian Women’s hockey team has always been strong, says hockey historian K Arumugam, but routinely missed victory at the last moment. At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, they finished in fourth place. At the 2023 Asian Games, they lost the semi-finals to China 0-4, though they’d won three out of the four matches and drawn the last one 1-1 against South Korea. “It’s as if there was some kind of jinx ,” says Arumugam.
Being defined by near-wins rather than overall achievements is hardly a flex. So when Sjoerd Marijne, their old coach, returned to the team after four-and-a-half years in January , he knew that the women needed to fix their confidence before anything else. “We discussed everything that had gone wrong in the past two years, both on and off the field,” says goalkeeper Savita Punia, 36. “He gave us matching bands to wear to remind us that we’re a team, and that we’re playing for India, not for ourselves.” That lesson extended to the small details too: Marijne made the women load and unload their own luggage onto the buses instead of letting the staff do it.
On the field, Marijne’s training sessions were precise and demanding. The women alternated between green and red sessions every week. Green meant strength-building and hand-eye coordination exercises. Red was for learning to work around less-than-perfect gameplay conditions: Fewer teammates, passing the ball in a too-narrow space, faster attack and defence. The coaches would split them into teams and have them attack and try to win the ball from each other. They’d repeat it about five to six times. Their performance coach, Wayne Lombard, estimates that each player would run about 25km to 30 km in an average week. “It drains your energy,” says forward Navneet Kaur, 30. “But it’s an important part of training because that’s exactly what happens in an actual game.”
Goal in sight
Lombard made them pledge to not eat sweets, chocolates or fast food until the LA 2028 Olympics. Psychologist Ben Wienk introduced team-building exercises: An obstacle course, in which one player led the other blindfolded across the hurdles. But the most important thing to fix was their penalty corner defence. Taeke Taekema, who previously coached the Chinese team, was brought in to teach India’s goalkeepers how to sling the ball low against the ground before flicking it across the field in one sharp, forceful move.
The tide had begun to turn as early as June. The team won the FIH Hockey Women’s Nations Cup, defeating New Zealand 2-0. Then at the World Cup, they scored two goals against one of their toughest rivals, China, pushing the match to a draw. They finished fifth in that World Cup, India’s best result since 1974. And during the second quarter of the Asian Games match in October, Punia, who says she visualises playing matches before she sleeps, judged accurately that China’s Zhang Ying would shoot to the left, and was able to stop it. It was one of many moments in that match that changed everything.
Arumugam, also the founder of Stick2Hockey.com says the current Indian women’s hockey team has honed their game to the point where “it’s perfect”. “Their defensive tactics are unmatched now,” he says. The team, meanwhile, have taken to calling Marijne, Shah Rukh Khan, after the Asian Games win, a reference to the popular film Chak De where the actor plays a hockey coach.
Curved upwards
There’s room for fun. Before the Asian Games final, they did a variation of one of their favourite warm-ups: Passing a football around without using their hands. The coaches often join in too. “We like to switch things up for them so they’re always energised,” says Lombard.
There’s been a change in how the team bonds with each other. The women hail from as far away as Punjab and Mizoram. Some came from hockey-loving families; others had to fight with their own families to take up the sport. They learnt that it was okay to open up to one another about their frustrations and worries. They now talk about being homesick or worrying what the coach thinks of their performance. “We openly share the best and worst times we’ve had,” Punia says. “We discuss everything now.” When they’re not thinking about hockey, they like to break out into impromptu Bollywood dance or karaoke sessions.
And, Marijne and the players like to prank each other. One time when they were in Malaysia, he made them nervous by telling them they had to record videos of the hotel they were staying in, and talk about its different amenities, for an important assignment. The women took over and were all over the hotel, recording take after take. Then, after they were done, he asked them to check the date. “It was April 1st,” Kaur recalls, laughing. Kaur is the one who’s always lurking behind corners, waiting to jump-scare her teammates. “I love scaring Lalremsiami [Hmarzote] especially. Her reactions are Bollywood-level dramatic.”
Tough love
What really turned the team around, Marijne says, was getting the players to see themselves as a self-contained unit, sharing the load rather than being bogged down by their own baggage. “If you focus on the team’s goal, you will fulfill your individual goals. The other way around will not work,” he says.
This lesson was put to the test at the Asian Games, when Sakshi Rana passed the ball to Lalremsiami Hmarzote, who was closer to the goal, knowing she would have a better chance at scoring. Arumugam calls it a shift from the strategy Asian teams have usually favoured, in which individual brilliance is the focus, towards a more European playing style, that looks at the game as one coordinated, synchronised effort. “We’d gone over the motions so many times over the past few months, that it was almost automatic,” says Kaur.
Bringing the Asian Games trophy home after 44 years has brought renewed attention to the game. Bravo reposted the video of the celebration on his X account, calling them champions. Former cricketer Gautam Gambhir, coach of the Indian national men’s cricket team also posted on X, calling them the nation’s pride. When Tete opened her WhatsApp after the match, it was inundated with messages from well-wishers and senior players. “I haven’t even checked them all properly.”
They’ll carry this moment with them to the Olympics. Hmarzote says she now knows how to make snap decisions under pressure, a skill she didn’t have at Tokyo in 2021. “This match has given us all the confidence to believe we can win.”
From HT Brunch, October 17, 2026
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