Abhinav Bindra

Abhinav Bindra, the rifle shooter who won India's first individual Olympic gold medal in Beijing in 2008, has since retirement worked mainly on the conditions in which Indian athletes train and recover, through the Abhinav Bindra Foundation Trust, based at Mohali in Punjab.

The foundation provides athletes with access to sports science, physical rehabilitation and high-performance training without charge, drawing on the network of sports medicine centres Bindra built after his own career was interrupted by a back injury. It organises its work around mental wellness, clinical intervention, education and social participation, and reports having worked with several thousand athletes and support staff across a range of sports. Its named programmes include an Athlete Mental Wellness stream, Sport4Her for women and girls, a STEAM scholarship for young athletes, and Youth and Olympism, which delivers the International Olympic Committee's Olympic Values Education Programme in India. In 2020 he opened the Abhinav Bindra Sports Medicine and Research Institute in Bhubaneswar.

Bindra has also worked on athlete welfare from inside the sport's governing bodies. He sat on the International Shooting Sport Federation's athletes committee from 2010 to 2020 and chaired it from 2014, was appointed to the IOC Athletes' Commission in 2018, and has been involved with India's Target Olympic Podium Scheme for funding elite athletes. In these roles he has pressed for attention to athletes' mental health, financial security and life after competition. His decision as ISSF committee chair to approve the removal of three shooting events from the Olympic programme in 2017 drew criticism as having been taken without adequate consultation.

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2009, the ISSF's Blue Cross in 2018, and the Olympic Order, the IOC's highest honour, in 2024.[2][3]