One is the son of a prosperous businessman with an Olympic-size shooting range in his backyard. Another grew up in a dusty village, sparring with his brother for use of a shared family bicycle. A third spent most of his youth in a musty, mouse-infested room at a wrestling camp here in the capital.

In the last two weeks, each won a medal for his country in Beijing, making it India's best performance at an Olympics.

Many in this country see the victories as being emblematic of a rise of a new India. Actually, they represent vastly different Indias that today exist side by side and the intensity of the new aspirations of young Indians up and down the social ladder.

"In the old days, we used to revere people who went to the Olympics," said Ayaz Memon, an editor-at-large at The Daily News and Analysis newspaper, based in Mumbai, who has written extensively about sports. "Now, we want winners. We don't want to be identified as losers, or fatalistic."

India's three winners have shot from obscurity to sudden fame.
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Abhinav Bindra, 25, from the northwestern city of Chandigarh, won a gold in the 10-meter air rifle competition. Vijender Kumar, 23, a bus driver's son from a village about 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, from here, won a bronze in boxing. And Sushil Kumar, 24, who learned to wrestle in the dirt on the outskirts of Delhi, also won a bronze. The Indian Express this week called it a reflection of "India's grassroots aspirations."

In stark contrast to China, where the government has helped groom a generation of young talent, athletes in India are largely on their own, backed by little more than the resources their families can muster.

Take, for instance, Kumar, the wrestler. His father, Diwan Singh, rode the bus an hour each way every day to bring his son a bucket of milk. To buy milk here in the city, where Kumar lived in a dingy room under the bleachers at Chhatrasal Stadium, would have been too expensive. His father kept a buffalo at home, in a village on the outskirts of the city, and the family sacrificed so the son would not go without.

Kumar's room at the stadium is lined with five wooden cots pressed close together for five burly wrestlers. Trousers hang from hooks on the wall. A pair of mice also share the room. On an altar are the medals that each of the five have won along the way, next to images of Hanuman, the Hindu god that wrestlers in India consider their patron saint.

Wrestling is one of India's oldest sports, revered in Hindu mythology and practiced in the dust of India's villages, particularly in the rough and tumble Haryana State, northwest of the capital. It is an unsung sport, however, and unlike tennis stars and cricketers, neither Kumar nor any of his fellow wrestlers here have received much notice. They did not expect any, even after Kumar's victory.

To be a pehelwan (wrestler in Hindi) is not for urban-educated, English-speaking youths, they insisted. It is for big burly country boys who compete in nothing but a tightly wrapped langot (Hindi for loincloth).

"You have to get into the mud," said Narendar Dalal, who at 27 is the oldest wrestler at this camp.

Rajesh Kumar, a roommate of Sushil Kumar, but no relation, said he doubted that the children of well-to-do folks would allow their children to wrestle. They would rather play tennis, he said. They would hesitate to take their clothes off.

By midmorning, after three hours of jogging, calisthenics and wrestling practice, the pehelwans here rushed to their canteen, which is no more than a tin-roofed shed. They ate flatbread and chickpeas.

Most of the wrestlers here, including Kumar, are vegetarians.

They are children of farmers, and wrestling was a ticket out of the dead-end countryside and into a steady government job - either in the police or paramilitary forces, or, best of all, like Kumar, in the Indian Railways.

This is why, Dalal said, their families invested so much in them.

"They think if we become good pehelwans, we will get good jobs and our life will be better," he said. "Look at Sushil Kumar!"

Bindra, the shooter from Chandigarh, has no need for a good job.

His father, A.S. Bindra, 59, is a prosperous businessman. He exports canned Indian curries to the Middle East and in 2001, when his son showed promise as a shooter, he moved his family to the outskirts of the city and erected a shooting range, modeled after one he had seen in Germany. He did not stop there.

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