The almost 45-day-long Indian elections have finally come to an end with the party of Narendra Modi retaining power with a bigger vote and more number of seats. In the massive Modi-wave, two prominent Indian sportspeople sailed into the lower house of the Indian parliament, thanks to their respective victories in the fiercely-fought general elections.

Athens Olympics silver medalist in Double Trap shooting, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won his second successive election when he was declared the winner on Thursday from a seat in the north Indian state of Rajasthan.

Rathore, who joined Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to become a member of parliament in 2014 and was made India's information and broadcasting minister before taking over as minister of sports, was pitted against fellow former Olympian and discuss-thrower Krishna Poonia, a three-time Olympian, who became the first Indian woman track-and-field athlete to win a gold medal at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games.

Poonia has been a sitting member of the state legislature of her home state, Rajasthan. However, the battle of the Olympians saw, a popular Rathore, who also served in the Indian army and fought in the 1999 Kargil War against intruders from Pakistan, hit the bull's eye after defeating Poonia, a candidate of the biggest opposition party, the Congress, by a thumping margin of close 400,000 votes. The winner of 25 international medals, including a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games at Manchester in 2002 and another in Melbourne in 2006, is expected to be inducted to the Modi cabinet once the prime minister takes guard for his second innings at the helm of the country's political power.

Close on the heels of Rathore's emphatic triumph, former Indian captain and prolific cricketer Gautam Gambhir hit a sixer in his maiden attempt. Gambhir, whose stellar batting performance in the final against Sri Lanka helped India win the 2011 ICC World Cup, hung his bat only last year and joined the ruling BJP just a few days before he was fielded from one of the key constituencies in Delhi.

The southpaw, who has fast emerged as a social media crusader over the years through his nationalistic tweets and widespread charity works for different causes, faced a stiff contest from Atishi, an Oxford-educated scholar, who has worked tirelessly to magically transform the capital's erstwhile dilapidated school education sector by working for the Aam Aadmi Pary (AAP)-ruled state government.

Gambhir almost had a baptism with fire as he found himself entangled in the eye of the storm as his opponent publicly accused the cricketer of distributing obscene and derogatory pamphlets against him. A soft-spoken and reticent Gambhir, however, refuted all the charges against him and threatened his rival party of dragging them to court. After a series war of words and trading barbs at each other, Gambhir won by close to 400,000 votes to open his new innings as a parliamentarian.

Another former World Cup-winning cricketer-turned-politician Kirti Azad, who has been a MP on a few occasions before and represented the ruling party in the previous parliamentary term, revolted against the BJP and joined the Congress just before this year's election. Azad, son of the former state chief minister and a member of India's 1983 World Cup team, bit the dust with his former party sweeping a majority of seats across India.

Another Olympic medalist and amateur-turned-professional boxer Vijender Singh was the Congress candidate from South Delhi parliamentary constituency in Delhi. The bronze medalist of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, who also pursued a brief acting career in Bollywood, tried to deliver some power punches for his party, but he finished a disastrous third in the maiden electoral bout of his life.