A hard-won bronze that glitters like gold

INDIA’S first medal in 41 years in Olympics hockey, a bronze in Tokyo after a stirring and unexpected fightback from 1-3 down, has caused grown-up men to cry and old men to dance like teenagers. A bronze is a bronze is a bronze, but a hockey bronze is diamond. Numerically, a bronze in hockey is equal to a bronze in, say, badminton; but in terms of emotion, history and symbolism, a bronze in hockey is much more desirable than a badminton bronze.

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For one thing, a hockey medal seemed to be ours by right — from 1928 to 1972, India won a medal in each of the 10 consecutive Olympic Games, including six gold in a row from 1928. Indians were masters of hockey — we won nothing else at the Olympics except medals at hockey. Then, in the 1970s, the medals were snatched away and the fans and players and the sporting brotherhood in the country have mourned the loss for over four decades.

Further, to understand what hockey meant for India’s soul, you need to know a bit about the role hockey played in forging the Indian identity in 20 years preceding Independence and the 20 years after it. In 1928, India won its first gold in Olympic Games hockey. Previously, the two times hockey was part of the Olympic Games, the British had won the gold, and the other medals had gone to European teams.

In 1928, Great Britain, the defending champions (there was no hockey at the 1924 Olympic Games), absented themselves from the Olympics, held in Amsterdam. Before the 1928 Olympics, on tour in England, the Indian team had beaten a Hockey Association XI 4-0 in a match at Folkestone. As Dhyan Chand noted in his biography, the home team was almost a full British team — the “Hockey Association XI included 9 international players and 2 trial men”. Clearly, the British did not want to dignify the contest against a colony by fielding their national team against it. The Indians played 11 matches in England, winning nine and losing one. The consequences of India’s win at Folkestone, and the other wins, were immediate — Great Britain did not field their team at the 1928 Olympics at Amsterdam.

India won all their matches easily, defeating Austria 6-0, Belgium 9-0, Denmark 5-0 and Switzerland 6-0. Dhyan Chand scored 14 goals, and Feroze Khan and George Marthins contributed five each. It was a team that had a fair sprinkle of Anglo-Indians, apart from representatives of all major Indian religions. Such a team thrashing Europeans in their own sport carried much symbolism — even if there were conflicts and fractures within the team — at a time when the freedom movement was getting increasingly intense, less than a decade after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

India repeated the feat in 1932 and 1936, winning all their matches, while Great Britain continued to give Olympics hockey a miss. After the hiatus caused by World War II, the Olympics were held in 1948, in London. India was independent, and the team from the United Kingdom had nowhere to hide — at their home Olympics, it had to participate. India were weakened by several players opting for Pakistan after the division of Punjab. India, UK and Pakistan were in separate groups, and each of them topped their group. Fittingly, in London on August 12, India beat its former masters 4-0 in the final. The country had seen a bloody Partition less than a year ago, but the win was a triumph of the idea of India — the team comprised several Anglo-Indians and players from all communities. Dhyan Chand’s mantle was taken on by a young man from Punjab, Balbir Singh, who scored twice in the final. This was free India’s first sporting success — we were still the masters of hockey, even after the bloody 1947.

Hockey was the balm to a fractured India’s wounds — hockey gave the country a place at the greatest festival of sport. India had little to be proud of — a huge population and deep poverty, hungry millions and droughts and floods. Every people, every nation must have something to be proud of — we had the hockey gold, and even our former colonial masters were fearful of facing our team.

The emergence of Pakistan as a strong power invested hockey with additional competitive edge and passion. Other teams were catching up, and India were not winning by huge margins any more — in 1956, the wins against Great Britain and Pakistan in the semifinals and final were by a 1-0 scoreline. Then, in 1960, disaster struck — their first-ever loss in the Olympics, that too in the final, that too to Pakistan! India won back the gold in 1964, but this time they were — unthinkable! — held to draws in the group stage. In the final, it was India vs Pakistan — and Mohinder Lal won them the gold with his 40th-minute strike, the team defending stoutly for 30 minutes.

The descent after 1964 was breathtaking — bronze in 1968 and 1972, nothing in 1976, when the team didn’t reach the semifinals for the first time. India did win the gold at Moscow 1980, but only six teams were in the fray, and the strongest teams were absent due to the US-led boycott. This took some sheen off the medal.

In 1976, the Olympics hockey tournament was played on astroturf for the first time — the game became faster, new rules seemed to be working against our style of hockey, and our fans and experts smelled a conspiracy to dethrone India. Ours was a hard-luck story at the Olympics thereafter — just edged out of the semifinals race in 1984, heartbreak in the final moments in the match against Poland in 2000, not even qualifying in 2008.

What was ours — a place at the head of the table at Olympics hockey — was wrested away. The fathers and grandfathers of boys who are now middle-aged men brought them up on tales of glory of Indian hockey. Since 1976, and especially since 1984, the pain of failure has gnawed at the soul of hockey’s lovers — a four-year cycle of hope and despair. This is the reason the bronze at Tokyo seems as precious as the gold India won at Tokyo in 1964 by beating Pakistan 1-0 in the final.