Milkha Singh
Orphaned by Partition and jailed as a thief, he became independent India's first great athlete
Milkha Singh was born in a village in Punjab that became part of Pakistan at Partition in 1947. In the killing that followed, his parents and several of his brothers and sisters were murdered. He hid, then fled to Delhi on a train, and lived in refugee camps and on the streets. He stole to eat, was caught and briefly imprisoned, and has described being at the point of turning to crime for good.
His brother persuaded him to try for the army, which turned him down three times before accepting him in 1952. It was there, in a cross-country race run to earn extra rations, that anyone first noticed he could run. He trained on his own with little coaching, often to the point of collapse.
In 1958 he won gold in the 440 yards at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, India's first athletics gold at those Games, and two golds at the Asian Games. Two years later, in Rome, he was among the favourites for the Olympic 400 metres. He looked over his shoulder in the final, lost his rhythm and finished fourth, missing a medal by a tenth of a second. He said it haunted him for the rest of his life.
He earned the nickname the Flying Sikh after winning a race in Pakistan in 1960. He died of Covid-19 in 2021, aged 91.