Mumbai, September 12, 2025: In the latest episode of the House of Glory podcast, an initiative by the Gagan Narang Sports Foundation, Olympian and Indian sports administrator Adille Sumariwala reminisced about his life as an athlete, coach, and sports administrator. In a candid interview, Adille spoke about Olympic Gold medallist Neeraj Chopra and how humble he is, “Neeraj has always been disciplined, is as humble as anything today and after the Neeraj Classic finished at 1:30 at night, he finished his event he was sitting and signing autographs and taking pictures with kids that’s the boy he is,” he said.
Adille also spoke about the myth that people have that athletes can make good administrators and said, “Athlete and administration are two completely different things. They cannot even be looked at the same way, let alone be compared.” He emphasized that being a great athlete does not necessarily make one a great administrator. “Just because you can run fast from point A to point B or kick a football or shoot a perfect 10, that doesn’t make you an administrator,” he said.
He further elaborated on the point by discussing the importance of education and added, “If you want to fight an Apple, GE, or IBM, you need people with that kind of thinking and quality. Where does that come from? The base is education. If you put an uneducated person—someone who hasn’t even been to university—in a top position, it would be a total failure.”
When pointed out that he himself was a successful athlete who is now a successful sports administrator, Adille said the two are completely different things, noting that he also has a background in finance, management, education, and experience to support his role as an administrator. “I have a bachelor’s in finance, a master’s in management; I’m an MBA gold medallist from the Asian Institute of Management, and I’ve completed a course at Harvard. I ran, and I was also in corporate, working at Tata for 15 years. I’ve been the chairman and managing director of a $9 billion company in India, and now I run my own organization. When you run companies like that, you gain understanding and experience, and you develop strategies and a fallback plan if that strategy doesn’t work. Sadly, not many people have the educational background or the management skills required to run an organization” he said.
During the interview, Adille also spoke about the doping and age fraud menace in India, his thoughts on India’s top athletes at present, and his views on India’s performance in strategy-based sports.
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