How India won its first Olympic hockey gold

May 26 will mark 92 years since India first won gold at the Olympic Games. In this excerpt from Dhyan Chand’s autobiography Goal, we recount the country’s glory days on the world’s largest sporting stage.


The 1928 Indian Olympic team with IHF officials.   -  The Hindu Photo Library

In our hockey programme in England, you must have noticed that we won all our five matches played at Merton Abbey and out of the five fixtures in the Folkestone Festival, we won four and drew the other. These pre-Olympic fixtures in England served us very well and by the time we left for Holland in quest of Olympic honours, we could claim that we were fairly conversant with English ho-ckey. We had the added advantage that since our team consisted of the smallest number of men, it was often necessary for our teammates to play in strange positions in the various matches.