Abhinav Bindra, from a Punjabi family in Chandigarh, won India's first individual Olympic gold in 2008 in the ten metre air rifle, shooting from a range his family built at home.
Punjab has produced Olympic and Commonwealth medallists in shooting, wrestling, athletics, boxing and hockey, and the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports at Patiala is India's principal coaching institution, established in 1961 in the Moti Bagh palace of the Maharaja of Patiala.
The Maharaja of Patiala's own sporting patronage, which funded cricket, polo and Olympic participation in the 1920s and 1930s, is the origin of a good deal of organised Indian sport.
Punjab's village sports culture, the akharas, the kabaddi circuits and the rural games at Kila Raipur, is a separate system from the institutional one and feeds it unevenly.
The state's sports budget and its facilities are modest relative to Haryana's, which has systematically outperformed it in Olympic sport for two decades on a deliberate policy.
Punjab's record outside hockey is largely in shooting, athletics and wrestling, and the shooting comes out of a small number of ranges and a strong club culture at Chandigarh and Patiala.
The institute at Patiala is the coaching centre for the whole country, and the state's own sports school system feeds into it.
Kabaddi is the mass sport and it is not Olympic. Its circle version is played at village tournaments across the Malwa and by the diaspora, on a circuit with its own money and its own doping problem.