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HT Syndication
Gurugram (Haryana) [India], September 26: A notice goes up in the lobby of a Gurugram tower listing the sports on offer downstairs that term. There are eleven of them. The father reading it played one. His daughter picks taekwondo. He has never watched a bout, cannot explain the belts, and signs her up anyway. F2Ps data shows that across Delhi-NCR, this is now the more common version of how a child starts a sport. FanToPark Play, which runs coaching for more than 1,000 children across 95+ residential societies in Gurugram, Noida, Dwarka and the wider NCR, opened its enrolment records for July 2026. Taekwondo is the most played sport in those societies, at 25 per cent of all participation. Badminton is close behind on 22 per cent, and between them the two account for nearly half of every child playing. Skating takes third on 12 per cent, ahead of football on 10. Table tennis follows at 8 per cent, tennis at 6, basketball at 5. Cricket, yoga, swimming and Zumba make up the rest. Set that list against the Olympic programme and something worth noticing appears. Taekwondo, badminton, football, table tennis, tennis, basketball, swimming and cricket are all on the rosterfor Los Angeles 2028. Roughly eight in ten of these children are training in a sport that will be contested at the next Games. Cricket is one of them, returning after 126 years. It has been played at the Olympics only once, in Paris in 1900. What changed is that a taekwondo class now runs downstairs, on a fixed schedule, with a certified coach. Children are picking them up in numbers nobody had counted until now. Which brings the story back to the father at the noticeboard. He cannot coach what his daughter chose. He has no memory of playing it, and nobody in his family can help her with it. He is not unusual, and that is the second finding in this data. It has a wider relevance. India has nominated Ahmedabad as its host city for the 2036 Olympic and Paralympic Games and sits in the IOC's continuous dialogue stage, with a decision due in 2029. The criticism that follows the bid most often is that India's Olympic ambition runs top-down, built around elite athletes and stadiums rather than the base beneath them. The base rarely announces itself. Sometimes it is a taekwondo class on a Tuesday evening in a Gurugram tower, taken by a girl whose father cannot tell a yellow belt from a green one. "A father who played gully cricket his whole life is signing his daughter up for taekwondo/skating. He cannot coach her, and he cannot play it with her, and he is doing it anyway. The appetite was always there. What was missing was somebody bringing the coach to the building in a very structured, consistent manner. That is what we are trying to solve," said Amit Purohit, Founder, FanToPark. FanToPark Play runs certified coaching inside residential societies across the NCR, currently across badminton, football, basketball, tennis, table tennis, cricket, skating, taekwondo, swimming, yoga and Zumba. The girl who picked taekwondo off the noticeboard will be in her twenties by 2036. Several thousand children like her are already three or four years into an Olympic discipline, in buildings nobody thinks of as sports infrastructure. About FanToPark FanToPark builds sports travel, fan experiences, and grassroots coaching in India. Its coaching vertical, FanToPark Play, runs certified sports coaching for children inside residential societies across Delhi-NCR. (ADVERTORIAL DISCLAIMER: The above press release has been provided by HT Syndication. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same.)
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