India had barely finished their lap of honour in Ahmedabad when captain Suryakumar Yadav started looking four-years ahead. The freshly-minted T20 World Cup trophy was on the table, yet the 33-year-old’s mind had drifted all the way to Los Angeles. “Obviously it has been a wonderful journey in the last one month though it didn’t start the way we wanted it to start but then it’s part of the sport,” he told reporters. “Throughout the journey till today it has been very special and collectively as a team what we have achieved I think is right in front of you [trophy]. So, [I’m] very happy with that and the next goal is the Olympic gold and also the team that we work with.”
That aim is no longer fanciful. Cricket returns to the Olympic programme in 2028, 128 years after Paris 1900, with six men’s and six women’s sides contesting a T20 tournament (20 overs per innings) between 14 and 29 July. On current ICC rankings, both Indian teams qualify automatically from Asia. All fixtures are pencilled in for Fairgrounds Stadium, a pop-up venue in Pomona, about an hour inland from central Los Angeles.
India’s men arrive at this point in rude white-ball health. They now hold the Champions Trophy (2025) and have just collected a third global T20 crown, the first on home soil. Suryakumar reckons the whole surge began two summers ago. “Everything was changed post-2024. We played a different kind of cricket in 2024 and from there we understood how this team needs to work forward, play forward and it’s been a wonderful journey since then,” he said. “We won an ICC Champions Trophy in 2025, played a completely different kind of cricket and now in 2026, we wanted to do something special in front of the home crowd. So we want to continue doing that in 2027, 2028, 2029 and never stop.”
Coaches inside the set-up talk about higher intent with the bat and braver, match-up driven bowling plans. Nothing revolutionary, just clarity. Former India opener WV Raman, watching on TV, noted: “They’ve removed the fear of failure. Once that happens, you play your best cricket.”
Plenty can change before 2028, of course—form, fitness, even the rules. But India’s skipper has put down an early marker. An Olympic gold now sits on the team’s to-do list, right next to everything else they have just ticked off.
