From India’s arrival to unrivalled dominion in Field Hockey – here's the first part of India’s famed Olympic journey

One more night’s sleep and the world is all set to welcome the biggest sporting event of all, the Summer Olympics which is slated to be held in Paris from July 26th to August 11th. In the 33rdedition of the sporting extraordinaire, the Indian contingent is going to field 117 athletes who will be duking it out for glory.

India have a very eventful history in the Olympics that saw them enduring quite a dearth of medals early on, despite Norman Pritchard bringing the first medal in 1900. In the very second edition of the Summer Games, India landed two silver medals with Pritchard setting the 200m and 200m hurdles in Paris alight.

However, since then, things went haywire for Team India and medals were hard to come by. When Field Hockey was introduced in 1908, India could not take part in the event and had to wait for a couple of decades before they finally made their footfall.

In their very first appearance in Hockey, the Indian team landed a gold medal without conceding a single goal in the tournament. With Major Dhyan Chand leading the charge alongside Roop Singh, India asserted their dominion in Amsterdam, heralding a new dawn for the sport in the country.

The following couple of editions in the Summer Games saw India landing gold again in Field Hockey, ruling Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936. Despite losing out a handful of excellent players to Pakistan after the independence, India didn’t allow the grip on Hockey to loosen as they came back stronger, standing atop the podium in three back-to-back editions namely 1948, 52 and 56.

It was in 1952 that India landed their first individual medal as KD Jadhav bagged bronze in men’s 57 kg freestyle wrestling. 1960 saw another new chapter where India’s valiant efforts would ring throughout the planet to give them a taste of the explosive offing to arrive.

The Indian hockey team did well enough but couldn’t get past Pakistan in the grand finale and had to be content with the Silver Medal while the iconic ‘Flying Sikh’ Milkha Singh missed out on the bronze medal in the 400m final by a mere one-tenth of a second.

Team India redeemed itself in the following edition of the Summer Games by beating Pakistan in the finale to clinch gold but in the next three Olympics, they had to keep themselves happy with bronze in the face of new superpowers rising.

The Indian hockey team did have its own share of challenges when in 1976 the idea of playing on an artificial turf was introduced for the first time. But they made up for it in 1980, bagging their last gold medal in Hockey which came in Moscow. Following this, the next 16 years saw India going empty-handed despite coming close on quite a few occasions. It was an unexpected slump before the Indian contingent took flight for a new dawn. However, that story will be coming to you in the next and the final part of this series. Stay tuned, everyone.