For six consecutive Olympic Games, 1928 to 1956 India finished as the gold medallist with an unbeaten run spanning all those editions.
Leading that run was none other than Major Dhyan Chand, fondly called ‘Dadda’ by his fans now. He was part of India’s champion team of the 1928, 1932 and 1936 Olympics.
While there are many books and hockey literature that includes stories of the days when Dhyan Chand used to be the centre of attraction wherever he traveled to play, it’s rare to find a video interview of the hockey wizard.
Thanks to Prasar Bharati Archives, one such video interview, when Dhyan Chand visited the Lucknow Doordarshan Kendra along with his son and 1975 World Cup winner, Ashok Kumar, for an interview.
Also seen sitting besides Dhyan Chand are Ashok’s teammates Mehbood Khan and Aslam Sher Khan.
Speaking in the short clip of the interview, Dhyan Chand describes how photographers during the team’s foreign tours used to click pictures of the Indian players practicing, which were later used as a tutorial to help young kids learn hockey.
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Rare Interview of Major Dhyan Chand | Hockey Player | Olympian
“There is no doubt that foreign countries have learned they have learned from India,” said Dhyan Chand in the interview
“I noticed during our days, when we used to go to the ground for practice in countries like Holland and Germany, their television crew and photographers shot us in slow motion and fast motion. But we never bothered as we were players. However, they used to capture the secrets of our play to train their own players,” he added.
Dhyan Chand, who captained India’s 1936 Olympics team, said that after he had retired in 1948 but kept travelling with various Indian teams, he saw a proof of that in Germany.
“I saw this in 1963 in Berlin, that they were showing those photos to their kids on a screen and used to tell them about the position of hands, feet, head; when you have to dribble the ball, where your head should be, etc,” said the legend who served the Indian Army and died at the age of 74 on December 3, 1979.
“They have trained so hard using all that (footage of Indian players training), that they have now started challenging India,” he said in the interview, the date of which could not be ascertained.
“I have noticed lately that they have started dribbling the ball more now, rather than just hitting. But they still praise us, saying ‘no one can play hockey like India’,” he concluded.
India’s golden run in hockey extended to 8 Olympic gold medals, the last of which came in 1980.
Forty-one years after that, India returned to the Olympic podium at the Tokyo Games in 2021 with a bronze medal and won another bronze at the Paris Olympics earlier this year.
India’s total Olympic medals tally in men’s hockey stands at 8 gold, 1 silver, 4 bronze.