Asian Games chaos left India’s Varun Sanyal stranded for nearly ten hours without a proper meal, an ordeal he later described simply as “running about, no food.” His account, shared this week, has reopened an old question in Indian sport: why do athletes and support staff so often pay the price for someone else’s poor planning?
Key Takeaways
- Varun Sanyal, part of India’s Asian Games contingent, says he spent close to ten hours in transit and waiting areas without access to food.
- The episode points to recurring logistics failures at multi-sport events — transport delays, accreditation queues, and venues with no food access for support staff.
- Long stretches without food, combined with physical exertion, can quietly damage performance and recovery — a fitness issue as much as an organisational one.
- India has faced similar complaints at past Asian Games and Commonwealth Games, suggesting this is a pattern, not a one-off.
Who Is Varun Sanyal and What Did He Say?
Varun Sanyal works with India’s contingent at the Asian Games, part of the wider support system — coaches, physios, and team officials — that keeps athletes competition-ready. His job usually happens off camera. This time, it didn’t.
Describing his day, Sanyal said he was on his feet and on the move for roughly ten hours, shuttling between venues, transport points, and accreditation checks, with no real chance to eat. “Running about, no food” was how he put it — a blunt line, but one that captured something bigger than his own bad day.
What Caused the Asian Games Chaos?
Reports around the incident point to a familiar mix of problems at large multi-sport events:
- Shuttle and transport schedules that don’t match athletes’ actual training or competition timings.
- Long accreditation and security queues that eat into rest windows.
- Food courts or dining halls placed far from practice venues, or open only during fixed hours.
- Support staff often treated as an afterthought in logistics planning, compared with athletes themselves.
None of this is unique to one Games edition. It’s the kind of Asian Games chaos that surfaces almost every cycle, usually in whispers from officials and staff rather than official complaints — because nobody wants to be seen as difficult before a medal round.
What Happens to the Body After 10 Hours Without Food?
This is where the story stops being just an organisational headache and becomes a fitness one. The body runs on glycogen — stored sugar in the liver and muscles. After eight to ten hours without eating, especially with constant movement, that reserve starts running thin.
Blood sugar dips. Concentration slips first, then coordination. For an athlete or a staff member expected to make sharp calls — timing a warm-up, reading a scoreboard, catching a bus that leaves in two minutes — that dip matters. According to the Asian Games‘ own scale — thousands of athletes and staff across dozens of venues — even small logistics gaps multiply into hours of lost rest for the people holding the whole operation together.
Fatigue like this doesn’t announce itself loudly. It shows up as slower reflexes, a shorter fuse, and muscles that recover poorly overnight. For someone in a support role, that’s a bad day. For an athlete a day before their event, it can be the difference between a personal best and an early exit.
The India Angle: A Pattern, Not an Accident
India’s contingents have flagged similar issues before — at past Asian Games and Commonwealth Games editions, officials and lesser-known athletes have quietly described long waits, transport mix-ups, and food access problems, especially compared with better-resourced national teams. The difference this time is that Sanyal’s line was blunt enough to travel.
| Issue | Common Cause | Effect on Athletes/Staff |
| Transport delays | Mismatched shuttle schedules | Lost rest, missed meal windows |
| Accreditation queues | Understaffed checkpoints | Hours added to simple tasks |
| Limited food access | Fixed dining hours, distant venues | Prolonged fasting, low energy |
| Staff deprioritised | Planning focused on medal contenders | Support crew runs on empty |
A Simple Fix Nobody Needs a Budget For
You don’t need a sports-science degree to see the fix. A body that’s been moving for ten hours on empty doesn’t need a supplement stack. It needs food, water, and stillness — in that order.
The recovery drill is almost embarrassingly basic. Sit down. Breathe slowly through the nose for four counts, hold for four, out for six, for two or three minutes. This alone brings the heart rate down and signals the body to stop treating hunger as an emergency. Then eat something simple — fruit, a handful of nuts, plain rice — before doing anything else. No foam roller, no recovery drink, no gadget required. The body, given a chance, resets itself.
That’s the quieter lesson inside this story. Sanyal’s ordeal wasn’t a training failure or a fitness failure — it was a planning failure that then became a physical one. The two are connected more often than sports administrators like to admit.
FAQ
Who is Varun Sanyal?
He is part of India’s support contingent at the Asian Games, working behind the scenes with the athletic team rather than competing himself.
What exactly caused the Asian Games chaos he described?
A combination of transport delays, long accreditation queues, and limited food access over a roughly ten-hour stretch, based on his own account.
Has this happened at other Asian Games or Commonwealth Games?
Yes. Indian officials and athletes have raised similar transport and logistics complaints at previous editions, though they rarely make headlines unless someone speaks up directly.
Is going ten hours without food actually harmful?
For most healthy adults it isn’t dangerous, but combined with constant physical activity, it lowers blood sugar, slows reaction time, and hurts recovery — a real concern for anyone performing under pressure.
What can athletes do if they’re stuck without food for long stretches?
Carry simple, non-perishable snacks, prioritise water, and use slow breathing to calm the body down before eating, rather than eating in a rush once food finally appears.
Conclusion
Varun Sanyal’s ten hours of “running about, no food” is a small story with a bigger point: elite sport still runs on unglamorous logistics, and when those fail, it’s the body that absorbs the cost. Better planning would fix most of this. Until then, the body’s own basics — rest, food, breath — remain the only reliable backup plan.