Cricket isn’t a sport in India; it’s a high-yield asset class.

Fourteen years ago today, in a dusty corner of Gwalior, the asset reached its peak valuation. Sachin Tendulkar, a man whose hamstrings were held together by sheer willpower and probably some high-grade medical tape, hit a single off Charl Langeveldt. He became the first male cricketer to score 200 runs in an ODI. The crowd lost its collective mind. Ravi Shastri, currently the high priest of cricket’s broadcast booth but then just a guy with a microphone and a penchant for hyperbole, screamed that a "Superman from India" had arrived.

It’s a great story. It’s also the moment cricket stopped being a game and started being a data-driven product.

Back in 2010, we didn't have 4K HDR streams. We had grainy feeds that looked like they were filmed through a potato. But that didn't matter. What mattered was the glitch in the simulation. For forty years, the 200-run mark in a one-day international was the "Four-Minute Mile" of the cricket world. It was supposed to be impossible. The human body wasn't built to sprint 22 yards for three and a half hours in 40-degree heat while wearing ten pounds of protective plastic and foam.

Then a 37-year-old with a bad back did it anyway.

If you watch the footage now, it’s jarring. There’s no flashy augmented reality graphics overlaying the pitch. There’s no "Win Probability" meter flickering at the bottom of the screen, powered by some half-baked AI. It was just a guy with a heavy slab of willow playing a version of the game that doesn't exist anymore. Today, every twenty-year-old with a gym membership and a carbon-fiber-reinforced bat tries to clear the ropes every third ball. The "Superman" feat has been democratized. Or maybe it’s just been cheapened.

Since that day in Gwalior, the double-century has been repeated ten times in men’s ODIs. Rohit Sharma does it for fun. Ishan Kishan and Shubman Gill did it before they were old enough to rent a car in most countries. We’ve optimized the fun out of the outlier. We’ve shortened the boundaries, flattened the pitches, and turned the bowlers into sacrificial lambs for the sake of "fan engagement."

The friction here isn't just about the stats. It’s about the price of progress. In 2010, the broadcast rights for Indian cricket were a drop in the bucket compared to the $6 billion monster the IPL has become. Tendulkar’s 200* was the ultimate marketing brochure. It proved that the format could still produce "viral moments" before we even used that term. It gave the BCCI the leverage to turn a pastime into a conglomerate.

But look at the cost. Tendulkar played 147 balls to get there. He didn’t rely on a "power-hitting coach" or a sensor embedded in his bat handle to tell him his swing plane was three degrees off. He just didn't get out. There’s a specific kind of exhaustion in that performance that you don't see in the modern T20-era slugger. It was a manual labor job disguised as a sport.

Shastri’s "Superman" comment was the original clickbait. It was loud, it was unnecessary, and it was perfectly calibrated for a nation that treats its athletes like avatars of the divine rather than people with metabolic limits. We love the myth. We love the idea that someone can transcend the physical.

But let’s be real. Tendulkar wasn't a superhero. He was a specialist who had spent two decades perfecting a single craft, finally finding the perfect alignment of a tired bowling attack and a flat deck. The fact that we still celebrate it with such religious fervor says more about our need for icons than the actual quality of the cricket played that day.

We’re obsessed with anniversaries because they remind us of a time before the algorithm took over. Before every six was sponsored by a predatory lending app or a "fantasy sports" platform that’s definitely not gambling. Feb 24, 2010, was the last time a cricket record felt like a human achievement instead of a planned hardware upgrade.

Now, we just wait for the next "unforgettable" moment to be pushed to our phones in 60 frames per second, tailored to our specific engagement metrics.

Does a record even matter if it hasn't been optimized for a TikTok transition?