By K. Datta, IANS
Soon after hosting the fourth Military World Games at Hyderabad, Indian armed forces added another feather to their cap when two distance runners, both army men, R.S. Yadav and Deepchand, lean and hungry looking like most distance runners, took the top two places among domestic runners in the prestigious Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon, though overall they crossed the finishing line 16th and 17th in a field dominated by Africans.
You can’t miss the point that the way our army runners are faring, it will only be saying the obvious that the country will have to look forward to its soldiers to narrow the gap in Indian and international standards.
The winner of Sunday’s race, Diodone Disi, hopes it will not be long before an Indian runner figures on the podium.
For the benefit of those with short memories, it would do well to recall here the glorious contribution of our men in uniform to Indian sport.
In fact, long before the idea of the Military World Games was born, Dhyan Chand had made the army of our then British-ruled country famous worldwide with his wizardry with a hockey stick and ball.
So impressed was Germany’s Fuhrer Adolf Hitler with Dhyan Chand’s fabled magic in the 1936 Berlin Olympics that the story goes that he offered to straightaway elevate our humble soldier from Jhansi to the rank of a general should he decide to join the German Army!
That 1936 Olympics team had at least one other brilliant player from the army, the handsome Ali Iqtidar Shah Dara, who along with Gurmeet Singh, a 1932 Olympian, was lost to international hockey when their regiment was ordered to the World War II theatre in Malaya (now Malaysia), where the two later joined Netaji Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army.
The legacy of Dhyan Chand was carried on by men like Nandy Singh, Balbir Singh, Haripal Kaushik and Hardyal Singh, to mention just a few.
For the record, the services won the Rangaswami Cup, emblematic of national hockey supremacy, at least eight times, starting 1953. No major hockey tournament of the country was complete without teams from cantonments like Ramgarh, Jalandhar, Meerut or Bangalore.
The services also contributed handsomely to other teams like football and basketball, throwing up stars like the legendary goalkeeper Peter Thangaraj and Khushi Ram, who was considered to be one of Asia’s best basketball players in his day till he badly hurt his eye on court.
Footballers like Chandan Singh, centre-half of the first 1951 Asian Games gold medal-winning team, Brig. Devine Jones, Col. Puran Bahadur Thapa and others of his famous Gorkha Brigade team were some other shining stars in days when Indian football was a force to reckon with.
The services also boasted a decent cricket team under the expert leadership of Lt. Col. Hemu Adhikari, a team that featured players like Gadkari, Dani, Muddiah and Sen Gupta, all Test players.
Servicemen also dominated sports like boxing, wrestling and track and field.
The contribution of track legends like the ‘Flying Sikh’ Milkha Singh are part of folklore, not to mention others like Shriram Singh and the late marathoner Shivnath Singh.
Scan the list of athletics medal winners of those bygone times and most of them, you will find, belonged to the services.
So why the decline till Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore put the military back in the headlines of sports pages with a shooting silver medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens?
The answer, in a word, is the spreading insurgency and increasing border threats. The military has been called upon to do more important things than practice sport on the playgrounds of peacetime cantonments.
Still, army chiefs like Gen. S. Padmanabhan, followed by Gen J.J. Singh, thought it was time the army did its bit to stem the rot in Indian sport in general. It was time someone acted to place India on the international medals tables.
Congratulating Rathore on his Athens silver medal, Gen. J.J. Singh famously remarked that one Olympic medal was not enough. Hope his successor, Gen Deepak Kapoor, heard that.
(K. Datta is former sports editor of The Times of India. He can be reached at [email protected])