CHANDIGARH:
Hockey
wizard
Balbir Singh Sr
tried to donate his Olympic medals in 1965 when then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri appealed to the countrymen to contribute to the National Defence Fund.
“There’s nothing bigger than your country. We must always be at the service of the nation, and in those troubled times, as a true Indian, I had only the Olympic medals to offer to the National Defence Fund,” Balbir Sr had said earlier.
It was on his insistence that the medals were kept in the Punjab chief minister’s office for a few months and they were returned with a letter that read: “These medals are the country’s pride and prestige and couldn’t be sold.”
Asked about that letter by TOI many decades later, he made an emotional statement, “There is a soldier in each one of us. There isn’t anything bigger than India.”
In the 2012 London Olympics, where Balbir Singh Sr was invited as the only living legend, his Olympic gold medals were displayed in an exhibition and insured for Rs 50 lakh each.
Lucky number 13
The number 13 is synonymous with bad luck in Christian countries, but for Balbir Singh Sr, the number had great significance. By his own admission Hindi translation of 13 ‘Tera’ for him referred to addressing the Almighty.
His shirt number during the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki bore the same number, and at the end of the tournament, the gold medal-winning Indian team fired a total of 13 goals.
Recalling an incident of the 1952 Olympics, Balbir Singh Sr had said that the van ferrying the team to the first match at the stadium had a number plate, that added up to the number 13. “I never felt that way, everything is in God’s hands, and if a number meant addressing to him, then I would happily wear it,” he had said during an interaction.
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