Gurbachan Singh Randhawaਗੁਰਬਚਨ ਸਿੰਘ ਰੰਧਾਵਾ

Early life

Gurbachan Singh Randhawa was born on 6 June 1939 in Nangli, a village in Punjab's Amritsar district, to Tehal Singh and Dhanwant Kaur. He came from a family of sportsmen — his father and all three brothers played sport — and he showed all-round athletic ability from childhood. He trained at Khalsa College, Amritsar, and his coaches, seeing a boy who could sprint, jump and throw with equal facility, steered him toward the decathlon, the ten-event test of the complete athlete.

At eighteen he broke the 6,000-point barrier in the decathlon and then pushed past 6,500 — marks that made him eligible for the 1960 Rome Olympics while still a teenager.

Career

Rome 1960 was a harsh education: inexperienced and undone by the heat on the second day, he could not finish the decathlon, while the spotlight fell on Milkha Singh's fourth place in the 400 metres. Randhawa learned from it. At the 1962 Asian Games in Jakarta he won the decathlon gold medal and was voted the Best Athlete of the Games — the finest hour of his career and a landmark for Indian athletics.

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics he was India's flag-bearer at the opening ceremony, and then produced the performance of his life: fifth place in the 110 metres hurdles final in 14.07 seconds, becoming the first Asian to reach an Olympic hurdles final. He also competed in the high jump and decathlon at the Games. He held four national records at his peak.

Major works

His competitive honours — the 1962 Asian Games decathlon gold and Best Athlete title, the 1964 Olympic hurdles final, four national records — were matched by official recognition: the Arjuna Award in 1961, making him the first athlete in India to receive it, and the Padma Shri in 2005. After athletics he served in the Central Reserve Police Force, retiring as Commandant, and received the Rashtrapati Puraskar for meritorious police service.

In 2021 Punjab's sports minister released his biography, Uddna Baaz (Flying Falcon), written by Navdeep Singh Gill — part of a state project to preserve the memory of Punjab's sporting pioneers.

Sports writers of his era called him the most naturally gifted all-round athlete India had produced — a man who could have specialised in any single event but chose the hardest test of all. The biography project was an admission that heroes like Randhawa had been allowed to fade from memory for too long.

Personal life

Randhawa married Jaswinder Kaur, herself a national-level discus thrower. His brother Harbhajan Singh and son Ranjit Singh Randhawa also earned distinction in sport. He later served as sports adviser to Punjabi University, Patiala, and received an honorary doctorate.

Legacy

Gurbachan Singh Randhawa competed in an era when Indian athletics had almost no infrastructure and little international exposure — and still reached an Olympic final. As India's first Arjuna awardee, his name is attached to the very beginning of the country's modern sporting honours system, and his 1964 hurdles final remains one of the great forgotten achievements of Indian Olympic history.