Milkha Singh

Milkha Singh was born on October 17, 1935, in the village of Govindpura, in the Muzaffargarh district of Punjab province in what was then British India and is now Pakistan ^[1]. Even the date carries a footnote: record keeping in rural Punjab was patchy, and Singh himself acknowledged that the officially recorded birthdate was an approximation rather than a certainty ^[2]. He was one of many children in a Sikh farming family of modest means, and his early years were shaped by village routines, long walks to school across hot sand, and the ordinary hardships of agrarian life.

That ordinary life ended violently in 1947. The Partition of British India into India and Pakistan unleashed communal massacres across Punjab, and Govindpura was engulfed in the violence. Singh's parents and several of his siblings were killed in the attacks; he later recalled that his father's dying words urged him to run for his life ^[2]. The teenager escaped, at one point hiding among passengers and reportedly travelling on a train to Delhi under desperate circumstances ^[3].

In Delhi he lived for a time in refugee camps and with a married sister, surviving through odd jobs and petty scrapes with the law. He briefly considered a life of crime before an elder brother, Malkhan, persuaded him to try for the Indian Army ^[2]. The army rejected him three times. On the fourth attempt, in 1951, he was accepted, a turning point that he credited for the rest of his life with saving him from destitution ^[1].

The army gave Milkha Singh structure, food, and, almost by accident, a sport. During his early service with the Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, he entered a compulsory cross-country race with several hundred recruits and finished near the front, which earned him a place in special athletics training ^[2]. Coaches noticed a raw runner with unusual determination, and Singh threw himself into the work with an intensity that became legendary among his contemporaries. He later described training sessions so punishing that he would vomit blood and collapse, driven by the conviction that running was his only route out of anonymity ^[2].

He settled on the 400 metres, a distance that punishes the body and rewards both speed and endurance. Steady improvement brought him to the national trials for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and he made the Indian team in the 200 metres and 400 metres ^[1]. Melbourne was a humbling experience. He was eliminated in the preliminary heats, but the trip proved formative: a conversation with the American 400 metres champion Charles Jenkins gave him a clearer picture of world-class training methods, which he adopted on his return ^[3].

The results came quickly. In 1958 Singh set national records and announced himself internationally at the Asian Games in Tokyo, where he won gold in both the 200 metres and the 400 metres ^[1]. Weeks later, at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, he won the 440 yards title, defeating the highly rated South African Malcolm Spence. It was independent India's first athletics gold at the Commonwealth Games, and no Indian man matched the feat in an individual track event for more than five decades ^[4]. The government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri, the country's fourth-highest civilian award, in 1959 ^[1].

Any account of Milkha Singh achievements circles back to a single race lasting less than 46 seconds. At the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Singh entered the 400 metres final as a genuine medal contender, having beaten most of the field at various meets in the preceding two years ^[3]. In the final he went out fast, then eased fractionally around the halfway mark, a decision he would replay in his mind for the rest of his life. The field swept past, and although he fought back over the closing stretch, he crossed the line fourth in 45.6 seconds by hand timing, recorded electronically as 45.73 ^[1].

The American Otis Davis and the German Carl Kaufmann both broke the world record in that race, with Spence of South Africa taking bronze just ahead of Singh ^[4]. The margin between third and fourth was roughly a tenth of a second. Singh's time stood as the Indian national record in the 400 metres for nearly four decades, until Paramjeet Singh bettered it in 1998 ^[3]. He called the Rome final the worst memory of his career, ranking the pain of that miss alongside the trauma of Partition ^[2].

The nickname that defined his public identity came from an unlikely source. In 1960, after initial reluctance, Singh accepted an invitation to race in Lahore against Pakistan's champion sprinter Abdul Khaliq. Returning to the country where his family had been killed was an emotional ordeal, but he won the race convincingly. Pakistan's president, General Ayub Khan, reportedly told him that he had not run but flown, and the title Flying Sikh followed him ever after ^[2]. He added two more gold medals at the 1962 Asian Games in Jakarta, winning the 400 metres and anchoring India's 4x400 metres relay team ^[1]. He made a final Olympic appearance at Tokyo in 1964 before retiring from competition.

Singh married Nirmal Kaur in 1962. She was an accomplished athlete in her own right, a former captain of the Indian women's volleyball team, and the two had met at a sporting event in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) several years earlier ^[3]. The couple settled in Chandigarh and raised three daughters and a son. Their son, Jeev Milkha Singh, became one of India's most successful professional golfers, the first Indian to join the European Tour, and himself a recipient of the Padma Shri, making them a rare father and son pair to hold the honour ^[4].

After leaving competitive athletics, Singh served in administrative roles rather than fading from public life. He was appointed director of sports in the Punjab state government, a position he held for many years while pressing, often bluntly, for better facilities and honest administration in Indian athletics ^[1]. He had risen through army ranks during his competitive years and was granted a promotion to junior commissioned officer in recognition of his Cardiff victory ^[3].

Those looking for Milkha Singh facts often fix on his relationship with awards. In 2001 he declined the Arjuna Award, India's honour for sporting excellence, arguing that it was being handed out too freely and that offering it to him four decades after his career amounted to an afterthought ^[4]. He donated many of his medals and mementoes to the nation, and they were displayed at a sports museum in Patiala ^[3].

In old age Singh became something close to a national elder statesman of sport. His memoir, The Race of My Life, written with his daughter Sonia Sanwalka and published in 2013, gave a frank account of the Partition killings, his refugee years, and the discipline behind his medals ^[2]. The book supplied the raw material for the Hindi film Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (Run Milkha Run), directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and starring Farhan Akhtar, which became one of the biggest Indian box office successes of 2013 and introduced his story to a generation born long after Rome ^[4]. Singh reportedly sold the film rights for a token one rupee, on the condition that a share of profits go to a charitable trust he had set up for struggling athletes ^[3].

He remained a fixture at athletics meets and public events well into his eighties, still lean, still direct in his opinions. He repeated one wish in interview after interview: to live to see an Indian athlete win the Olympic track and field medal that had escaped him ^[4]. Neeraj Chopra fulfilled that hope with a javelin gold at the Tokyo Olympics in August 2021, weeks after Singh's death.

In May 2021, during India's devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Singh contracted the virus. His wife Nirmal Kaur, also infected, died on June 13, 2021. Singh died five days later, on June 18, 2021, at a hospital in Chandigarh at the age of 85 ^[5]. The Indian government announced state honours for his funeral, and tributes came from the prime minister, athletes across generations, and admirers in Pakistan ^[5].

Anyone asking who was Milkha Singh soon finds that the answer extends past a medal table. His trophy count was substantial: Asian Games golds in 1958 and 1962, the Commonwealth title of 1958, and a national record that outlived his career by decades ^[1]. Yet his larger significance lay in timing and biography. He was independent India's first track athlete of genuinely world class, and his rise from a Partition orphan sleeping in refugee camps to an Olympic finalist gave the new republic a story about what discipline could achieve without privilege or resources ^[4].

His fourth place in Rome occupies an unusual position in Indian memory, mourned and celebrated at the same time. Coaches and commentators invoked it for sixty years whenever an Indian athlete approached an Olympic final, and Singh himself used the memory as a teaching tool, telling young runners that a single tactical hesitation can outweigh years of preparation ^[3].

Any balanced Milkha Singh biography also records his afterlife in popular culture. The film that carried his name made the phrase Bhaag Milkha Bhaag a shorthand for perseverance across South Asia, and his memoir remains widely read ^[4]. Stadium stands, athletics awards, and countless school essays carry his name in India today. For a man who once said the army made him, and whom running remade, the Flying Sikh became less a nickname than a national possession ^[2].