UNBELIEVABLE: Abhinav Bindra won India's first individual Olympic gold yesterday. PIC/AFP

It is time to celebrate the most significant moment in the history of Indian sport. The defining moment came when Abhinav Bindra shot the final round in the 10m air rifle with little or no emotion to win India's first individual Olympic gold. Watching it on TV it appeared that he always knew he would do it. Such was his demeanour and self confidence.

I have always maintained that a country's sporting identity is defined by its performance at the Olympics. Now that this young man has established our great country's sporting identify with such elan and flair, our sports administrators and government need to huddle together with urgency to draw up a plan on how they will capitalise, endorse, romanticise and use Bindra's achievement to inspire and cajole our countrymen and media into believing that we can also aspire to be at the top of the medals tally in the greatest sporting spectacle on earth.

Our world champion Twenty20 cricket team received wild and euphoric receptions as well as gifts in money and kind from across the country. For a sport played in only few countries, the lop-sided nature of these celebratory events reflected both the lack of rationalism in our collective mind-set and the lack of alternative Olympic achievement by our sportspersons. That has now been changed forever and it now becomes the duty and obligation of our authorities to make Bindra into an icon, to be celebrated, rewarded and made into a hero.

I would like the scale of celebrations and financial rewards to him to be at a scale which should make the cricketers' Twenty20 bounty look like loose change.

It is crucial for us as a nation to seize this moment and use it to transform Indian sport from its undertones of despair and self pity to a vibrant, energetic movement injected with self-confidence and hope. Let's look forward now to 2012 and the 2016 games with anticipation as building blocks to 2020 when we can challenge USA and China for the No1 spot in the medals tally.

Geet Sethi is an eight-time billiards champion