A team we Indians never knew about

When we think of dominance, at least in sports, what comes to mind? The Australian cricket team of the 2000s, Michael Phelps, and the Brazilian football team of the 1960s are some of the players and teams we may think of. However, let me tell you about one Indian team that dominated a sport in a way that no other team could ever dream of matching. No, I am not talking about cricket—I am talking about hockey.

The Indian hockey team of the 20th century set a new standard for dominance. We won six consecutive Olympic gold medals in 1928, 1932, 1936, 1948, 1952, and 1956—a streak that could have been even longer if the 1940 and 1944 Olympics had not been cancelled. For 52 years, India won a medal at every Olympics except one.

We had legends whom the hockey world will remember forever. One of them was Major Dhyan Chand, who won three Olympic gold medals, scored around 400 international goals, and has one of India’s biggest sporting awards, the Dhyan Chand Award, named after him. Leslie Claudius, who is regarded as one of the greatest half-backs in hockey, won three gold medals and one silver. There was also Udham Singh, who also won three gold medals and one silver, and Balbir Singh Sr., who helped India win three consecutive Olympic gold medals.

Even after 1956, India continued to enjoy a relatively dominant run. We won silver in 1960, losing to a Pakistani squad that included several players who had been born in undivided India. We won gold again in 1964, bronze in 1968 and 1972, and the Hockey World Cup, which was established in 1971, in 1975.

In 1976, India returned empty-handed from the Olympics for the first time in many years. However, in 1980, we won our last Olympic gold medal in hockey.

After that, India went without an Olympic hockey medal for 41 years before winning consecutive bronze medals in 2021 and 2024. However, the modern team remains only a shadow of the dominance India once enjoyed. The worst part is that most people do not even know how great our hockey team once was.

One issue I would like to highlight in this blog is the lack of investment in sports other than cricket in India. We dominate cricket and perform reasonably well in a few other sports, but we still lag far behind many countries despite having a population of nearly 1.5 billion people.

I hope that, in the near future, India begins investing more seriously in sports such as hockey so that we can once again enjoy the kind of dominance we experienced in the good old days.