The post-medal scramble: why athlete agencies are signing champions now

Sharmila Dhankar threw 9.81 metres from a seated chair at Scotstoun Stadium last month and ended India’s twenty-year wait for a Commonwealth Games para athletics gold. She is 40. She grew up in a village in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district, lost the use of a leg to polio at two, and did not pick up a shot put until she was 34. Three weeks after that throw, she has an agent.

The agency is IOS Sports & Entertainment, and Dhankar was one of seven Indians it announced on Aug. 19. Four are boxers: Priya Ghanghas, Arundhati Choudhary, Jadumani Singh Mandengbam and Ankush Panghal. Asmita Dey is a judoka. The seventh, Navdeep Singh, was not in Glasgow at all — he is the reigning Paralympic F41 javelin champion from Paris. Six of the seven came home from Scotland with a medal, five of those gold. Jadumani took silver at 55 kg.

Glasgow’s closing ceremony was Aug. 2. The signing package landed seventeen days later. Rahul Trehan, IOS’s chief operating officer, described the group in the language agencies always use for these announcements — resilience, long-term careers, personal brands — but the date is the more interesting document. It is late enough for the results to settle and early enough that a brand manager can still picture the bout.

Lisa Delpy Neirotti, who teaches sport management at George Washington University, has told reporters that an Olympic medallist who is not in sponsorship conversations within about a month of the Games will find the calls harder to get. India runs on that clock with a steeper drop at the end of it. Trehan has made the same point in other interviews. Cricket puts something in front of the audience every month; Olympic sports get a four-year pulse — a rush of brand interest after a Manu Bhaker or a Neeraj Chopra medal, then a long quiet until the next Games produce someone new.

The size of the prize explains why nobody waits. WPP Media’s Sporting Nation report valued India’s sports celebrity endorsement market at ₹1,350 crore in 2025, roughly $153 million, and gave cricket 87 percent of it. Badminton, athletics, boxing, shooting and everything else divide the remaining ₹172 crore. The non-cricket share did grow 46 percent in the Paris year, to about ₹170 crore, on the strength of Chopra, P. V. Sindhu and Bhaker. That is real growth on a base small enough that three athletes can move it.

What the money buys has changed too. Bhaker’s per-deal fees were reported to climb from the mid-twenties of lakhs toward ₹1–1.5 crore a year once dozens of brands got in line after Paris. Chopra’s estimated brand value rose by tens of millions of dollars inside a fortnight. The work attached to those numbers is rarely a single television spot any more. It is a stack: Instagram, training footage, regional campaigns, speaking dates, and multi-year associations meant to outlast the congratulations post. An athlete who already has an audience when the medal arrives gets a longer run at it than one who starts building afterwards.

Image rights make the whole thing messier. During Games periods the Indian Olympic Association asserts group image rights on behalf of Team India sponsors. Outside that window, athletes and their agencies spend real effort policing “moment marketing” — brands that drop a medallist’s face into a congratulatory ad without paying for it. IOS has sent notices for its clients; Baseline Ventures has done the same for others. Federation kit deals, personal sponsorships and personality rights all sit in separate boxes. A good share of an agency’s first month after a medal is paperwork: who owns which photograph, which product categories are exclusive, and who gets a bill when a bank posts a gold-medal graphic.

The two para signings are the quieter wager. Dhankar’s F57 gold was India’s first Commonwealth para athletics title; Navdeep arrives as a Paralympic champion. IOS already has Sumit Antil, Nishad Kumar and Nitesh Kumar on its books. Brands still spend less on para athletes than on able-bodied Olympians — Neerav Tomar, who founded the agency, has said the gap is still wide — but Paris and Glasgow gave the category stories that are hard to walk past. Signing these two now assumes the money eventually follows the medal table.

Cricket will keep its 87 percent, and none of the seven is buying a way around that. What they are paying for is somebody who keeps working through the long stretch when the phone stops ringing on its own. Dhankar has said the Asian Para Games and another Paralympic cycle are what she wants next; she will be 42 by the time the second one comes around. Whether a brand is still on the other end of the line by then is the part Glasgow did not settle.