Vaishnavi Saravanakumar describes herself on Instagram as “India’s rubber band girl”. In a typical video post, dressed in a rhinestone-studded crimson catsuit and accompanied by a Bollywood-rap anthem, she demonstrates an improbable feat. From standing, she snakes into a deep back bend, curls her head and shoulders up under her tiger-striped calves, and finishes beaming to camera with ankles crossed under her chin. This is yoga as we have seldom seen it before.
Earlier this year, the Indian government announced that it will push for yogasana’s inclusion in the Olympics, ahead of the country’s bid to host the 2036 Games. The news came the week before the inaugural World Yogasana Championship, held in Ahmedabad in June, at which Saravanakumar, a gold medallist, was one of 522 yogis competing.
Olympics? World championships? It’s enough to make some of us choke on our Yogi tea. How can a 5,000-year-old practice that values self-awareness and letting go of external validation be a suitable forum for judging, point-scoring and, not to put too fine a point on it, showing off?
In fact, in India, yoga competitions are nothing new. The first formal asana competition took place in 1973 in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Only recently, however, has it been pitched as entertainment for a global audience. At the championships in Ahmedabad, which ran over five days, 79 countries were represented, at a stadium with 2,000 spectators. The event was broadcast live on national TV. Perusing the 269-page rulebook, there is even an anti-doping policy. For yoga.
Udit Sheth, president of Yogasana Bharat (Bharat being the traditional name for India), has spent years working to turn yoga into a global competitive sport. An entrepreneur involved in building and operating sports stadiums, it was his vision that brought the world championships to life. “My work in sport, and my own yoga practice, really made me interested in how we can package an ancient heritage in the right manner to take it to the Olympics,” he tells me over Zoom from his office in Mumbai. “But to be clear, we’ve coined the word ‘yogasana’ to describe it, not yoga. Yoga is a very wide practice that includes meditation and concentration. Asana [the physical postures] is only one part of the eight petals of yoga.” The other petals, or “limbs” as they are also known, include moral vows, breathing techniques, meditation and enlightenment.
While competitive yoga might make sense for limelight-seeking contestants, I’m sceptical about whether it will engage spectators. Might it not be a teensy bit boring? If Sheth is offended by the question, he doesn’t show it. “These talented athletes have remarkable strength, posture, balance and discipline. If America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent can be on television and get such great ratings, these yogasana athletes can also do wonders.”
Would a fair comparison be gymnastics? “It’s a useful starting point,” he says. “Both practices demand strength, flexibility and coordination. Both involve assessment by judges. But the difference is that yogasana has a traditional solo event, a group event and a pair event. Unlike gymnastics, it is static. The challenge is to remain composed and controlled when you are in that posture. It’s not merely about reaching a difficult position, it’s about staying in it. It’s about how to excel while being still.”
Some categories require athletes to maintain the full extent of the posture for 60 seconds. Maybe the thrill for the viewer comes from waiting for someone to fall over, I suggest. But Sheth believes the drama comes from watching people striving to excel. “The crowd becomes the judge. That’s where it becomes interesting. One routine of three minutes would have maybe seven or eight difficult postures. Asanas are categorised by difficulty and an objective code of points.”
Further nods to the entertainment industry come from the event’s hectic theme music with its driving bhangra beats and shouty vocals. Then there are the flamboyant costumes. “When you see the contestants, it’s almost like you’re on the ramp for a fashion show,” says Sheth. “There are sequins, and the female athletes take their makeup to the next level. People want to look great on Instagram. But we are careful to preserve cultural sensitivity; revealing clothing is not permitted. We can’t have women competing in bikinis.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all yogis approve. “It’s not even that I have an issue with people performing with their bodies and then calling it yoga for individual recognition and gain, or for cultural nationalism,” says longstanding UK-based yoga teacher Divya Kohli. “My problem is that the abiding foundations of yoga require that you are no longer a servant to your ego. That means you do not seek external approval. Measuring how someone does a posture on physical difficulty and awarding points for it? This is horrifying. This is madness.”
Sheth suggests that turning yoga into a sport might encourage more young people to find their way back to traditional yogic principles. “The only way to get the youth of the world to understand the yogic way of life is to give them something exciting, to take it out of spirituality and into excitement, into sport.”
How does he respond to charges that, by its very nature, yoga should not involve competition? “It’s a fair question that deserves a thoughtful answer,” he says. “Many people practise yoga because it gives them the space away from comparison and external judgment. What we are offering is a competitive pathway for people who want it. We are not forcing anyone to do it and we are not claiming to assess the whole of yoga, only the asanas, and only those that are agreed on. Also, if any sport is done right, the competition is within. It’s me versus me, it’s not me versus you. It’s how good I am today against how good I was two weeks ago.”
Not everyone in India is happy with the direction of travel, though. In 2020, Yogasana Bharat became India’s national yoga federation. But after a legal challenge brought by the Yoga Federation of India (founded in 1974), in July this year the Delhi high court quashed Yogasana Bharat’s recognition on the grounds that its status was granted by the Indian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports when it had been in existence for just three months. It held that this violated the national sports development code. The court ordered a fresh selection process of all eligible bodies, including the incumbent, which is continuing.
There are further hoops to jump through before Olympic yoga can happen. World Yogasana has 40 affiliates globally, including in Canada and various African nations, but it needs at least 50 across three continents to meet the International Olympic Committee’s recognition criteria. There is no affiliate yet in the UK and only a few in the rest of Europe (so far, Spain, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Romania).
Yoga competitions in the UK have largely emerged from London-based Bikram (hot) yoga studios. Sam Cruickshank, president of the Great Britain Yoga Sports Federation, says that at competition level, UK yoga sport is still in its infancy. “It is quite niche. At the national championships, we only get about 20 people competing.”
He stresses that to compete in the UK, you don’t need to be an elite athlete and it is open to any style of yoga. “What makes it inspirational is you can be stiff, you can be injured. It doesn’t matter. You can do simpler postures in accessible versions. You can still enjoy being up on the podium. I tell people to think of it more as a demonstration than a contest.”
Inevitably, Cruickshank finds himself having defensive conversations about competition with fellow yogis. “What I often say is that it’s not about making yoga competitive, it’s about taking our innately competitive nature and making it more yogic. I like to compare it to some of the martial arts that have a deep kind of spiritual, ethical background and tradition, but no one says, you can’t do judo or karate at a competition.”
Now 54, Cruickshank took up yoga relatively late in life. “I’m not particularly flexible or fit,” he says. “I only started in my late 30s to address midlife issues, you know when the body starts to creak a bit and you don’t have so much energy.” He attended classes at a hot yoga studio in London where many of the leading lights of the competition world were teaching. It was only when he watched an event (performed at room temperature, usually after a hot yoga warm-up session) that he understood the appeal. “It was really inspiring. I couldn’t initially see myself competing but I got so much encouragement from my teachers who made me believe that this was something I could do and was worth doing.”
He began competing in 2018 in the UK and has since done so in China and France, as well as acting as MC at the European Championships in Malmö, Sweden. “Being up on that stage in Beijing in 2018 was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life,” he says. “You weren’t allowed music back then, so it was total silence apart from the clicking of cameras.”
Despite that, he stresses that one of the best things about competitive yoga is enjoyment. “It does have massive social benefits. The competitions are really good fun. You meet all sorts of people. When you get to international level, you have an excuse to travel around the world with a bunch of like-minded people.”
For some people, he says, treating yoga as a sport can help to maintain motivation. “What happens, especially with hot yoga, is there is rapid, astonishing progress at the beginning. Then you plateau because your body isn’t going to exponentially get stronger and more flexible. Competing gives you a way of measuring progress in your practice. Maybe this year you’re focusing on doing a three-minute sequence for competition. And then the next you might attempt slightly more difficult postures.”
Almania Colombo, 41, is a former dancer with the American Repertory Ballet. Like Cruickshank, she fell into competing almost by accident. A three-time European competition winner, she also won international championships in 2016 and 2018. She is now on the technical committee for the International Yoga Sport Federation – which is not affiliated with World Yogasana – and teaches hot yoga in London. “I was doing my yoga teacher training in Los Angeles in 2011 and one of my friends wanted to compete, and asked me to join her,” she says. “For me it represented a new challenge, and something that intimidated me a little. I believe that in life it’s good to do things that scare you, especially if the fear is in our minds and not a real threat.”
Although she was used to performing in her former career, doing yoga before an audience presented unique challenges. “Competing in yoga feels very different,” she says. “As a dancer you are constantly moving, and in a yoga competition you have to find the stillness. You can’t hide anything, time seems to slow down and you feel everything around you so much more.”
Her first European championship took place in the incongruous setting of a Prague shopping mall. “We had a stage set up in the middle, with escalators all around, and people watched from the balconies above. It was November, people were wearing coats and shopping while we were in leotards. The environment was loud, busy and colourful, and weirdly enough that helped me find the total stillness in me, not allowing my own inner voice to be too loud.”
A key issue facing yoga’s chances of reaching the Olympics, she says, “is that there are many organisations running their own competitions and not joining the same umbrella. Although yoga means union, and it’s what we are trying to achieve, there is still a lot of unnecessary ego.”
Nevertheless, a pathway has been started. Yogasana is likely to feature as an Indigenous sport at the 2030 Commonwealth Games hosted by India. Although still subject to approval, the other contenders are games rooted in Indian playgrounds – kabaddi and kho kho – which are widely considered to be less likely to attract the necessary level of interest from other Commonwealth nations. If yoga does feature in 2030, the next step would be for it to be introduced as a demonstration sport at the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane.
Sheth remains hopeful. “I think there is an opportunity to create a system for yoga like Fifa, where every country has its own federation.” Sustainability for the long-term is key. “It’s not only about getting to the Olympics, it’s about staying there. We don’t want to end up like breakdancing. It got to the 2024 games in Paris. But that was the end of it.”
