Reborn In 17th century India with Black Technology - Chapter 1100

Chapter 1100: The Olympics (10)

In Austria, a group of merchants crowded around a long wooden table in a warm, bustling tavern, voices raised in excitement as they relived every throw and takedown from the Olympic wrestling and mixed martial arts finals. Tankards clinked, and the room buzzed with animated debates over who should’ve won by points and who had shown true warrior spirit.

In Prussia, the streets of Berlin had turned into a festival of their own. People danced to lively music, mugs of beer sloshing as they cheered for their hometown hero, Karl Fischer, who had brought home a silver medal. Bonfires crackled, and the entire capital felt like it was beating to one proud, jubilant rhythm.

In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a circle of sharply dressed bankers erupted in laughter and applause inside a private club. They had placed a hefty wager on several events, and every result had swung their way.

In Sergiyev Posad, Vasily Vasilievich Golitsyn declared the entire day a holiday; the town rejoiced as their own heroine, Digga Vanov, tore a gold right from the hands of the Bharatiya Empire in the featherweight mixed-martial-arts bout.

Despite the Olympics carrying the unmistakable shadow of the Bharatiya Empire, their rival, the people of England, couldn’t suppress their pride. Every pub, every drawing room, every street with a flagpole seemed to swell with cheers when their athletes performed well. Rivalry or not, victory was still victory, and the English celebrated it with joy.

In France, the atmosphere was entirely different. At the Dior Painting School, young artists gathered around the newspaper illustration of Sophie Bernard standing tall on the podium, silver medal around her neck, her fist thrust confidently into the air after defeating the Ming Empire’s contender in the middleweight division. Her pale, powerful, almost statuesque physique captivated them. Within minutes, whispers turned into excitement, Sophie Bernard, strong and unapologetically fierce, was becoming their new ideal for athletic beauty and form. Her image was already inspiring sketches, studies, and discussions about a new standard of strength in French art.

Throughout Europe, the craze of the Olympics swept through newspapers, pamphlets, and street-corner stories. Everything was about the games. Daily conversations revolved around who won which event and how they won it. Tales, rumours, and dramatic retellings of Olympic moments became the staple of noble ladies’ tea-party chatter, while teenage boys across the continent obsessed over which female athlete had the best body and who looked the most beautiful.

The Olympics inadvertently seemed to have ignited a new kind of nationalist spirit across Europe. People who had never cared for a flag, who had always identified only with their local nobles, were now proudly hanging the banner of their kingdom outside their homes. For the first time, sports had forced its way into the mainstream discourse of European society, and it reshaped how the continent saw itself.

As the Olympics went on, hundreds of sports startups were taking shape in different countries throughout Europe. While all this was happening, the Bharatiya brands Priyadarshini and Olitha had record-breaking sales not only in the Bharatiya Empire but also in Europe, ASEAN countries, East Asia, Suvarna Dwipa, Africa, and the distant Americas.

The American colonies that were being populated at a rapid speed by the Europeans usually only imported the essential industrial materials from the Bharatiya Empire, like tools, machines, industrial goods, and other things, while exporting raw materials and minerals, but since the time the Olympics was announced, and especially since 1692, the demand for sporting goods from the Americas has increased by over 300%.

Riding the high tide, the stock market share of Priyadarshini and Olitha had broken through the 500 million varaha, and decisively crossed the top 100 public companies list in Business Weekly ranking, right alongside the top manufacturing giants.

All of this was even before the main event that everyone was waiting for, the team games.

On the 18th of April 1692, the team sports officially kicked off.

The first event was cricket. Sixteen countries took part, divided into four groups of four. Each team played the others in its group, and the one with the highest points would advance to the semi-final knockout stage.

Naturally, the Bharatiya Empire dominated. By the end of the group rounds, no one was surprised to see them in the final four. The empire that invented cricket, along with four other team sports, fielded one of the strongest squads in the world, and their qualification felt almost routine.

Italy also made it through, which again surprised no one. As one of the first nations to establish diplomatic ties with the rising Bharatiya Empire, Italy had long welcomed Bharatiya cultural influence without resistance. And of all the team sports introduced to them, the Italians had, for some reason, taken a deep liking to cricket and football.

Football made perfect sense, fast, aggressive, and naturally suited to the European temperament. But cricket was a different story. Its sudden popularity in Italy was so unexpected that even Vijay had frozen the first time he saw Italian crowds cheering for it. The thought kept nagging at him: in his previous life, would cricket have spread across Europe too, if not for the thick British stigma attached to it?

Anyway, the third team was Surya Nagari, which wasn’t surprising in the slightest. Their entire lineup consisted of professional players from the Bharatiya Empire who had simply shifted residence to qualify for the Olympics under a different banner.

The fourth team, Vidhya Nagar, had the exact same story: seasoned Bharatiya professionals competing under a new regional identity to increase their chances of appearing on the Olympic stage.

The semi-finals were set: the Bharatiya Empire versus Vidhya Nagar, and the Italian Federation versus Surya Nagari.

In the first innings, the Italian Federation won the toss and chose to bowl, Surya Nagari managed to hit an impressive 222 in 20 overs with six wickets, but when the Italian Federation played the second innings, Surya Nagari encountered a huge upset as they could not get Louis Philippe Alponzo Rosie, the star batsman of the Italian Federation, out before the 10th over, letting him score 100 by himself. In the end, Rosie scored 122 and got out in the 12th over, but by that time the score of the Italian Federation was already 160; it only needed 62 runs from 56 balls.

Although the bowling did make a comeback and put the game on edge as four wickets fell off the Italian Federation, the foundation left by Rosie was simply too good; the Italians won the match in the 18th over with four wickets to spare.

As for the semi-final between the Bharatiya Empire and Vidyanagar, unfortunately, there was no competition at all. There was a reason why athletes from the Bharatiya Empire went to the vassal countries to represent it instead of playing for their own country; it was because the selection was extremely stringent and the athletes were a cut above the rest.

If every nation had one or two star players, the players of the Bharatiya Empire were all specialists, and given that they were trained for a whole year in team-building activities, they worked like a well-oiled machine.

In the first innings, the Bharatiya Empire won the toss and chose to bat and giving a target of 312 for 20 overs with three wickets, while Vidyanagar of King Gautam suffered a complete wipeout of the team in the 16th over, with the score only being a pitiful 160.

Maybe it was fate, due to the proximity, it was the Europeans that contributed the most to the Olympics in terms of finances, second only to the Bharatiya rich people who came all the way from the mainland, so their participation in the team sports as audience was very important. Vijay had initially thought that the viewership would drop because he did not think any European country could make it to the finals, but the Italian Federation gave him a huge surprise.

The finals were not only a competition between the team of the Bharatiya Empire and the Italian Federation, it also became a battle between Asia and Europe, the East and the West.

For the first time ever, the borders in Europe became illusory, and all the people in the audience originating from Europe, no matter the ethnicity or kingdom, began to wave the Italian flag.

Of course, as a response, all the eastern countries, even the people from Greece, Egypt, Israel, Persia, Africa, Lalishtan, and Asia, began to wave the saffron flag of the Bharatiya Empire.

The atmosphere in the large Airavatha Stadium was electrifying; even the vibration from the people chanting in unison could be heard several kilometres around the stadium.

Athens hasn’t been this lively for at least a thousand years.

The match finally kicked off with the Italian Federation getting the ball.

The captain of the Bharatiya team, Indira Chauhan, was the first up to bat, with the jersey number seven, and as he came on to the stadium, the chants of Indra and Indra resonated throughout the crowd.

Indra ended his knock with 52 runs in 8 overs, while Ishta Rathore, his companion, fell for 43 in the 9th over, and through it all, the Italians were throwing everything they had at the crease. Maybe it was the weight of expectation, maybe the pressure of carrying an entire empire’s pride on their shoulders, but the performance was undeniably subpar, nothing like the usual, razor-sharp gameplay of the Bharatiya Empire. By the time the dust settled, the first innings closed with the Bharatiya Empire putting up 253 in 20 overs.

The Europeans were over the moon. The target was daunting, but with Rosie on their side, victory didn’t seem impossible. And they weren’t wrong. Rosie proved himself the greatest asset of the Italian team, blasting an astonishing 80 runs in just the first five overs.

But the Bharatiya Empire’s boys were back in lethal form. Every run Rosie tried to take became a battle. Fielders dived to cut off doubles, flinging themselves across the outfield to stop soaring sixes. Yash’s deliveries thundered in faster than ever, each yorker delivered with the precision and menace of a weapon, seemingly aimed to shatter bat or leg, with equal intent. Every ball, every play, screamed the fierce, relentless energy of a team unwilling to give an inch.

Experiencing the full offensive of the Bharatiya Empire, even Rosie could not hold on any more, he scored 80 in the first five overs, but by the time the 10th over arrived, he only scored 30 more runs, he did score a century which looked like it brought some momentum back to the Italians, but to the Italian devastation, he got out in the 11th over, the score of the Italians was 143 for 3, they still needed 110 runs from 63 balls.

If there was another player like Rosie in the Italian team, maybe it was possible, but unfortunately, under the impact of Rathore, Yash, and Arjun Rao, wickets fell, ending with the Italians only scoring 215 for 20 overs with nine wickets.

The Bharatiya Empire were the Olympic winners, and a thunderous roar broke out in the stadium.

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