International career He represented India in the 200m and 400m competitions of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games.[1] His inexperience meant that he did not progress from the heat stages but a meeting with the eventual 400m champion at those Games, Charles Jenkins, both inspired him to greater things and provided him with information about training methods.[2] In 1958, Singh set records for the 200m and 400m in the National Games of India, held at Cuttack,[3] and also won gold medals in the same events at the Asian Games. He then won a gold medal in the 400m competition at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games with a time of 46.6 seconds.[4] This latter achievement made him the first gold medalist at the Commonwealth Games from independent India.[5] As of 2013, he is still the only male Indian to have won an individual athletics gold medal at those Games.[6] Singh was persuaded by Jawaharlal Nehru to set aside his memories of the Partition era to race successfully in 1960 against Abdul Khaliq in Pakistan, where a post-race comment by the then General Ayub Khan led to him acquiring the nickname of The Flying Sikh.[a] Some sources say that he set a world record of 45.8 seconds in France,[3] shortly before the Rome Olympics in the same year but the official report of the Games lists the record holder as Lou Jones, who ran 45.2 at Los Angeles in 1956.[8] At those Olympics, he was involved in a close-run final race in the 400m competition, where he was placed fourth.[7][5] Singh had beaten all the leading contenders other than Otis Davis, and a medal had been anticipated because of his good form. However, he made an error when leading the race at 250m, slowing down in the belief that his pace could not be sustained and looking round at his fellow competitors. Singh believes that these errors caused him to lose his medal opportunity and they are his worst memory.[3] Davis, Carl Kaufmann and Malcolm Spence all passed him, and a photo-finish resulted. Davis and Kaufman were both timed at a world-record breaking 44.9 seconds, while Spence and Singh went under the pre-Games Olympic record of 45.9 seconds, set in 1952 by George Rhoden and Herb McKenley, with times of 45.5 and 45.6 seconds, respectively.[8][4] The Age noted in 2006 that Milkha Singh is the only Indian to have broken an Olympic track record. Unfortunately he was the fourth man to do so in the same race[9] but the official Olympic report notes that Davis had already equalled the Rhoden/McKenley Olympic record in the quarter-finals and surpassed it with a time of 45.5 seconds in the semi-finals.[8] At the 1962 Asian Games, held in Jakarta, Singh won gold in the 400m[4] and in the 4 x 400m relay.[10] He attended the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, where he was entered to compete in the 400m, the 4 x 100m relay and the 4 x 400m relay.[11] He did not take part in either the 400m[12] or the 4 x 100m relay[b] and the Indian team of Milkha Singh, Makhan Singh, Amrit Pal and Ajmer Singh were eliminated when they finished fourth in the heat stages of the 4 x 400m.[14] There have been claims that Singh won 77 of his 80 races,[3] but these are spurious. The number of races in which he participated is not verified, nor is the number of victories, but he lost a 400m race at the 1964 National Games in Calcutta to Makhan Singh[15] and he did not finish first in any of his four races at the 1960 Olympic Games[8] or the aforementioned qualification races at the 1956 Olympics.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 10:21:27 +0000
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