Hockey in India: Olympic Golds, Dhyan Chand and MCQs

No sport has given India as many Olympic medals as hockey. Between 1928 and 1980 the Indian men's team won eight Olympic gold medals, a record no other country has matched in the game, and the questions that come from this topic are mostly about that run, about Major Dhyan Chand and about the rules and terms of the game. A common trap should be cleared first: hockey is often called India's national game, but the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports has stated that no sport has been declared the national game of India.

India at the Olympics

India played its first Olympic hockey tournament at Amsterdam in 1928 and won the gold, with Jaipal Singh Munda as captain. Six golds came one after the other, at Amsterdam in 1928, Los Angeles in 1932, Berlin in 1936, London in 1948, Helsinki in 1952 and Melbourne in 1956; that stretch is called the golden era of Indian hockey. Two more golds followed, at Tokyo in 1964 and at Moscow in 1980, which remains the last Olympic gold India has won in the game.

India has also won an Olympic silver, at Rome in 1960, and bronze medals at Mexico City in 1968, Munich in 1972 and Tokyo in 2020, where the team beat Germany 5–4 in the match for third place.

Major Dhyan Chand

Dhyan Chand was born on 29 August 1905 and died on 3 December 1979. His control of the ball was such that he was called the Wizard and the Magician of hockey, and he won gold with India in 1928, 1932 and 1936, captaining the team at Berlin. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1956. His birthday, 29 August, is observed in India as National Sports Day, the day the President gives away the national sports awards. The country's highest sporting honour carries his name as the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, and the National Stadium in New Delhi is the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium. His younger brother Roop Singh and his son Ashok Kumar, who scored the winning goal in the 1975 World Cup final, also played for India.

The World Cup and other titles

The Hockey World Cup began in 1971 and India has won it once, in 1975 at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, beating Pakistan 2–1 in the final under the captaincy of Ajit Pal Singh. In the Asian Games, India won the hockey gold for the first time at Bangkok in 1966 and again at Bangkok in 1998 and Incheon in 2014. The women's team won the Asian Games gold at Delhi in 1982 and the Commonwealth Games gold at Manchester in 2002.

Other players are asked by name. Balbir Singh Sr, who won gold in 1948, 1952 and 1956, scored five goals in the 1952 Olympic final and was the first sportsperson to receive the Padma Shri. Leslie Claudius won four Olympic medals, three of them gold. Later names worth remembering are Dhanraj Pillay, Sandeep Singh, P. R. Sreejesh, Rani Rampal and Manpreet Singh.

The rules, the terms and the trophies

A hockey team has eleven players on the field, one of whom is the goalkeeper. A match is played in four quarters of fifteen minutes each. The field measures 91.4 metres by 55 metres, and the ball is hit with a stick curved at one end, only with its flat face. The scoring shots are the field goal, the penalty corner, often called the short corner, and the penalty stroke, taken from a spot in front of the goal. A green card is a warning, a yellow card suspends a player temporarily and a red card sends the player off for the rest of the match. Bully, dribble, scoop, flick, tackle, hat-trick and astroturf all belong to hockey; the artificial astroturf surface came into the Olympics at Montreal in 1976 and changed the way the game is played.

The world body is the International Hockey Federation, the FIH, founded in 1924 with its headquarters at Lausanne in Switzerland; the game in India is run by Hockey India. Among domestic tournaments, the Beighton Cup of Kolkata is the oldest, and the Agha Khan Cup, the Rangaswami Cup, the Nehru Trophy, the Scindia Gold Cup and the Obaidullah Gold Cup are the names that appear in papers.