India has no shortage of sporting talent. Walk into any training facility in the country, and you will find dedicated, disciplined competitors who have given years of their lives to their sport. Some of them are very good. A few are exceptional. Most of them, you will never have heard of.
The ones you have heard of are doing fine for themselves. Virat Kohli sells everything from energy drinks to luxury cars. The big names in cricket, tennis and badminton are on billboards, fronting campaigns, signing deals that would make most professionals envious. Fame, in Indian sport, is extraordinarily lucrative. But fame is also extraordinarily rare.
For the vast majority of Indian athletes, there are no billboards. There are no brand deals landing in the inbox. There is just the training, the competition, the recovery, and the monthly reality of trying to fund all three without a salary, a sponsor or a safety net. The question of how they survive, financially and professionally, is one that Indian sport has never adequately answered.
Niharika Vashisht has found one answer. The triple-jumper is among a select group of Indian athletes who have cleared the 13-metre mark to qualify for the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya this September. She has been competing for fifteen years. She has also been a content creator for five. In her telling, one career would not have survived without the other.
THE ECONOMICS OF BEING AN ATHLETE IN INDIA
Ask Vashisht what it actually costs to maintain an elite sporting career, and she does not hesitate. Physiotherapy runs to around Rs 1,500 a session, once or twice a week. Quality supplements, especially imported ones, cost Rs 30,000 to Rs 35,000 a month. Then there is daily nutrition, organic food, strength and conditioning, and the various other expenses that stack up quietly in the background. Not to forget the usual expenses like accommodation, travel, and everything else.
Add it all up, and you are looking at a monthly outgoing that would strain most household budgets. Here is the perspective that makes that number land harder: according to a 2023 research paper on labour incomes in India, an individual earning Rs 50,000 a month sits in the top five per cent of the country’s entire income distribution. For a serious athlete, that same figure is not a salary. It is a running cost.
“If you want to be the best in your field, you need the best of everything,” Vashisht said in an exclusive interview with India Today. “For an athlete without sponsorship, all of this is expensive and difficult to manage.”
A regular job is not a straightforward solution either. An athlete’s day is built around training, recovery and diet. The rhythm of elite sport does not leave much room for a nine-to-five. By her mid-twenties, Vashisht was acutely aware of the bind. She had finished college, she was competing seriously, and she did not want to keep leaning on her parents to fund it all.
“That was the point when I started thinking I needed a stable source of income to support myself and my training,” she says. “Social media came into my life at exactly the right time.”
A PHONE AND A PANDEMIC
She had barely been on social media before 2019, keeping a private account and largely ignoring the platforms. The turning point came after she returned from the World University Games, where she had represented India. Her agent, recognising where things were headed commercially, encouraged her to start building a presence.
“My agent told me social media was going to become huge in the next few years and that it could be a good avenue to explore alongside my sporting career,” she says. Vashisht was not immediately convinced, but she listened.
Then the pandemic arrived. Gyms shut, competitions were cancelled, and the country went indoors. For most athletes, the lockdown was a period of frustration and stalled momentum. For Vashisht, it turned out to be the best possible time to start. With training relocated to whatever space she could find and no competitive calendar to focus on, she began posting.
Workout clips, training snippets, behind-the-scenes footage from a career most people knew nothing about. Nothing elaborate, nothing overly-produced. Just an athlete doing what she does, with a phone pointed at it.
“I started posting workout clips, behind-the-scenes videos and snippets from training just for fun,” she says. “Slowly, people started responding really well and that is how the journey began.”
The response surprised her. People watched, shared, came back for more.
WHEN INJURY HITS, KEEP POSTING
The real test of what she had built came not when things were going well, but when they fell apart. An ACL injury stopped her season and sent her into a rehabilitation process that lasted the better part of a year. Treatment meant regular travel to Bengaluru and Chandigarh. The costs, on top of everything else, were considerable.
She kept posting. Updates from the physio table, progress reports from the gym, the slow and unglamorous business of getting a knee back to full strength. It was honest rather than polished, and audiences responded to that honesty. More importantly, the income kept coming in.
“My ACL rehab involved frequent travel for treatment,” she says. “I had to pay for physiotherapy, diet and rehab. Social media income made that possible. Without it, I would have had to depend entirely on my parents.”
But the financial lifeline was only part of it. There is a particular kind of accountability that comes from having an audience, even a modest one, watching you recover. Every post was a small commitment. Every update was a reason to show up to the next session. Vashisht found that the platform she had built to fund her career was also helping her hold herself together during the hardest stretch of it.
“I kept posting parts of that journey on social media, and in a way, that helped me stay accountable and consistent,” she says.
“Knowing people were following the process and looking for updates gave me extra motivation to keep going.”
Injury has always been one of the most financially and psychologically precarious moments in an athlete’s career. You are not competing, you may be losing visibility, and the costs are higher than usual. Social media, for Vashisht, addressed both problems at once. It kept the income flowing, and it kept her anchored to a sense of purpose when the training track felt very far away.
Her presence on these platforms had also begun opening doors beyond sport. A casting director found her on Instagram and cast her in an advertisement alongside Akshay Kumar. It was an early sign that the platform could work in ways she had not initially anticipated, creating opportunities in advertising and entertainment that an athlete operating entirely offline would simply never encounter.
THE CAMERA NEVER SWITCHES OFF
The practical reality of how Vashisht creates content is worth understanding because it dismantles the assumption that this kind of work requires significant time or resources. At the end of most training sessions, her father, who is often present, records one or two reps on his phone. She edits the footage herself. The editing, she notes, has an unexpected bonus: watching her own movement back helps her analyse technique.
“It is very simple,” she says. “I usually ask my father or a training partner to record one or two reps out of a session. I edit my videos myself. It is not overly complicated or high effort.”
That simplicity is part of why she believes content creation is a genuine and replicable pathway for athletes across disciplines. You do not need a production crew or a media strategy. You need a phone, a platform and some consistency. The story, the effort, the stakes: athletes already have all of that. They just need to point a camera at it.
But the camera, once switched on, is not easily switched off. The pressure to stay consistent does not pause when training is going badly or when the mental energy simply is not there. Brand collaborations depend on engagement. Engagement depends on consistency. Which means there is always a quiet obligation sitting alongside every training session, every recovery day, every moment of doubt.
“Even if training is not going well or you are not in the right mental space, you still feel the need to post,” she says. “That pressure to always stay visible is probably the hardest part.”
It is a tension that should not be underestimated. Athletes are already carrying the physical and psychological weight of high-performance sport. The content creator’s obligation to always show up online adds another layer to that. The financial benefits are real.
But they come at a cost that does not always show up in the highlight reel.
JAPAN AWAITS
The Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya are scheduled for September, and Vashisht has done her part. The 13-metre mark is cleared. Whether she makes the final travelling squad is a decision that lies with the selectors, not with her. She is characteristically unbothered by the things outside her control.
Asked whether her social media profile might factor into the competition in any way, whether rivals have watched her content or formed impressions, she gives the answer of someone who has spent fifteen years learning what matters and what does not.
“Maybe competitors have seen my content, maybe they have opinions, maybe they do not,” she says. “I do not think too much about that.”
The two worlds she inhabits, the athlete and the creator, have never really been in conflict for her. They have always served the same purpose. One funds the other. One documents the other. And when the competition begins, only one of them matters.
“My focus is to approach the Asian Games with a neutral mindset and stay fully prepared, regardless of everything happening off the field,” she says.
But Vashisht is not alone in figuring this out. Across disciplines, a quiet shift is underway. Rishika Khajuria, a 25-year-old fencer and content creator, is using her platform to do for fencing what Vashisht has done for athletics: make an invisible sport visible, and find a way to fund it in the process. In an interview with India Today in August 2025, she was candid about the necessity of it.
“Since fencing in India is a new sport, we don’t get a lot of sponsors,” she said. “So it is important for us to get attention through social media. That is the plan.”
The plan, it turns out, is the same across the board. Train, post, recover and repeat. For thousands of Indian athletes still working out how to fund the next training block, the next physio session, the next supplement order, the story is no longer just Vashisht’s. It is becoming a movement. You are already doing the work. You might as well document it.
– Ends
