India, Oct. 17 -- 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 was barely any disbelief. "Going into this tournament, our mindset was fixed," 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. 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 and an army of trolls. "We were losing every match, and with it, our confidence," recalls Tete. And yet they dreamed of Gold. Because they spent the last year honing not just their play, but themselves too. See how they turned their fate around. The Indian Women's hockey team has always been strong, says hockey historian K Arumugam, but routinely missed victory at the last moment. "It's as if there was some kind of jinx," says Arumugam. 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." 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. And during the second quarter of the Asian Games match in October, Punia 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 "their defensive tactics are unmatched." 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. There's been a change in how the team bonds with each other. The women hail from as far away as Punjab and Mizoram. They learnt to talk to each other about being homesick or what the coach thinks of their performance. "We share the best and worst times we've had," Punia says. When they're not thinking of hockey, they break out into dance or karaoke sessions. Marijne is also the one who's always lurking behind corners, waiting to jump-scare the players. "I love scaring Lalremsiami [Hmarzote] especially. Her reactions are Bollywood-level dramatic." What really turned the team around, Marijne says, was getting the players to see themselves as one 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." 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 usual strategy of Asian teams, which is built on individual brilliance, towards a European playing style, which focuses on 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. Gautam Gambhir, coach of the national men's cricket team, called them the nation's pride, on X. When Tete opened her WhatsApp after the match, it was inundated with messages. "I haven't even checked them all properly." They'll carry this moment with them to the Olympics. Hmarzote says "this match has given us all the confidence to believe we can win."...