A watershed year for Indian sports despite its lows

Some stellar performances by seasoned veterans and promising youngsters continued to raise the bar in Olympic sports but there was heartbreak when corruption scandals blighted India's favourite obsession, cricket, in a see-saw year for the country's sportspersons.

There was the usual administrative wrangling in some sports but all that was thrown into the backburner by a hectic schedule which included Commonwealth and Asian Games.

On the cricket field, the courtroom drama surrounding IPL spot-fixing scandal, which made N Srinivasan a BCCI president-in-exile, hogged daily headlines, a sad commentary on the state of a game for which India is a spiritual home and biggest money-spinner as well.

If the scandal left followers of the game disturbed, they were in for a huge shock when Mahendra Singh Dhoni retired from Test cricket in the last week of the year.

It was a bolt from the blue given that Dhoni hardly dropped any hint of the "strain" of playing all three formats, which he cited as the reason for bidding adieu to the five-day game.