The room where this started is not much to look at. It is an indoor hall at the Maulana Azad (MA) Stadium in Jammu, where beginners borrow repaired kit and learn to hold a sabre after school. Over the weekend, the two names most closely tied to that hall reached a level no fencer from Jammu and Kashmir had reached before.
The J&K Sports Council announced on Sunday that Shreya Gupta and Vishal Thapar have been named in India's sabre squad on the road to the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan — the first sabre fencers from the Union Territory to get this far. Gupta has a place in both the individual and team events; Thapar is in the men's team sabre.
"The J&K Sports Council is immensely proud of our athletes and their coaches, whose dedication has made this historic achievement possible," the Council said in its statement.
Who they are
Neither name is new to anyone who has followed Jammu's small but stubborn fencing scene. Gupta, 21, is the fencer who picked up her first sabre at MA Stadium and went on to win Commonwealth gold in Lagos earlier this month. Thapar, 32, took silver in the men's team event at the same championship. Both had already earned places in India's squad for the World Fencing Championships in July and have been training at the national camp.
What has changed is the size of the stage. The World Championships put them among the world's best; the Asian Games put them in India's medal-hunting continental team, alongside Olympian C.A. Bhavani Devi. India's women's sabre line-up reads Bhavani Devi, Gupta, Jefarlin Jani Rexlin Simla and Shruthi Joshi; the men's sabre squad is Karan Singh, Gisho Nidhi Kumaresh Padma, Thapar and Lakshay Badser.
How you get to an Asian Games in a sport nobody teaches you
This is the part that matters for a reader in Jammu who has never picked up a blade. Fencing here has almost no pathway — a handful of coaches, borrowed equipment, and a single serviceable hall. The route these two took ran through the national selection ladder: the Fencing Association of India named its senior squad off results at ranked national and international events, with the 26th Senior Asian Fencing Championships in New Delhi (June 19–24) serving as the direct qualifying event for the Games. Strong results there and on the international circuit — Gupta's Commonwealth gold among them — are what put them in the frame.
The Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games run from 19 September to 4 October 2026, with the fencing staged at the Aichi Sky Expo. For J&K, having two sabre fencers in that squad is not a one-off flourish; it is the first evidence that the sport can produce Asian-level athletes from a base this thin.
Why this is more than a medal count
Every so often a result lands that quietly redraws what a young person in Jammu thinks is possible. A cricketer in the Ranji side, a chess player at the nationals, a karter in Europe — and now two fencers in an India Asian Games squad, both trained in a city with one working hall.
The lesson is not that fencing is glamorous. It plainly is not, at least not here. The lesson is that the ceiling is higher than it looks. If two athletes can reach the continental team out of MA Stadium's borrowed kit, the honest question for the system is what a second hall, a full-time coach and a steady supply of blades might produce next.
That is also where the story is unfinished. J&K's Khel Gaon academies now list fencing among their disciplines, which is exactly the kind of feeder a sport like this needs. Whether the Union Territory builds on this — more equipment, more coaches, competitions closer to home — will decide whether Gupta and Thapar are the start of something or a lucky pair of exceptions.
For now, two fencers from Jammu are on India's Asian Games radar, and a hall at MA Stadium can point to them. That is a genuinely big deal.
Sources: Greater Kashmir; Daily Excelsior; The Tribune (FAI squad); Olympics.com (Asian Games 2026 schedule).
