Balbir Singh Sr.ਬਲਬੀਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਸੀਨੀਅਰ

Early life

Balbir Singh Dosanjh was born in 1923 in Haripur Khalsa, a village in the Jalandhar district of Punjab's Doaba region. His father, Dalip Singh, gave him his first hockey stick when he was a boy, and he began playing at school in Moga, where he started out, improbably, as a goalkeeper before moving up the field to defence and finally to centre-forward, the position where he would become immortal.

The decisive moment of his youth came when he watched a newsreel of India's triumph at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Dhyan Chand, the wizard of Indian hockey, became his idol on the spot. In 1942 he moved to Khalsa College in Amritsar, where the coach Harbail Singh took charge of his training. He led Panjab University to three consecutive All India inter-university titles from 1943 to 1945 and played for undivided Punjab in the national championships of 1947, months before Partition scattered the team. After Partition he joined the Punjab Police in Ludhiana, whose team he would captain for two decades.

London 1948

A year after independence, Balbir Singh was selected for India's first Olympic hockey team as an independent nation at the London Games. He scored freely through the tournament, including two goals in the final against Great Britain at Wembley Stadium, as India won 4-0 and claimed gold. It was the new nation's first great sporting triumph, won against the former colonial power on its own ground.

The London victory announced the arrival of independent India on the world sporting stage, and the young centre-forward from Doaba had announced himself as Dhyan Chand's heir. But greater glories were still to come.

Helsinki 1952: the immortal final

By the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Balbir Singh was the senior star of the side, vice-captain to K. D. Singh and India's flag-bearer at the opening ceremony. He scored nine of India's thirteen goals in the tournament, saving his finest hour for the final against the Netherlands. There he scored five goals in a 6-1 victory, a record for the most goals by an individual in an Olympic hockey final that stands to this day.

No player before or since has dominated an Olympic final so completely. The five-goal haul, combined with a hat-trick against Britain in the semi-final, made him the tournament's leading scorer and the most feared forward in world hockey.

Melbourne and beyond

At the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, Balbir Singh captained India to a third consecutive gold, completing a hat-trick of Olympic titles that places him among the immortals of the sport. In all he scored 246 goals in 61 international matches for India, a staggering strike rate. He added a silver medal at the 1958 Asian Games before retiring from playing.

In 1957 he became the first sportsperson ever to receive the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian honour. He then built a second career as a coach and manager, guiding India to bronze at the 1971 World Cup and to victory at the 1975 World Cup in Kuala Lumpur, still India's only World Cup title. His teams never failed to reach the podium in the eight major tournaments he led.

Honours and legacy

The honours of his later years were richly deserved: he lit the ceremonial flame at the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi, was named Indian Sportsperson of the Century in a 1982 newspaper poll, was chosen by the International Olympic Committee as the only Indian among sixteen legends of Olympic history, and received the Major Dhyan Chand Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015.

Balbir Singh died on 25 May 2020 in the Chandigarh region after a long illness, at the age of ninety-six. For all his records, those who knew him remembered a quiet, modest man who had carried Indian hockey's golden age on his shoulders and asked for little in return.