hi INDiA Copyright 2022-2050
Pause, rewind, play: Milkha Singh’s iconic sprint at the Rome Olympics
For decades, India has been used to heartbreaks at the Olympic Games. And among those, essays could be written just about the country’s famous fourth-placed finishes that were inspiring and agonising in equal measures. PT Usha’s in 1984. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi’s in 2004. Dipa Karmakar and Abhinav Bindra’s in 2016.
And perhaps the most iconic of them all: when the world witnessed a remarkable 400m men’s final at the 1960 Rome Olympics that saw Milkha Singh finish a whisker behind the bronze medal position.
The legendary athlete is a four-time Asian Games gold medallist and the 1958 Commonwealth Games champion, but his greatest performance was the fourth-place finish in Rome.
For world athletics, the men’s 400m event at the Rome 1960 Olympic Games was extraordinary because USA’s Otis Davis and Germany’s Carl Kaufmann set a new world record in a photo-finish. Imagine that, not one but two racers giving the best the world has seen on the same day. The two men were hand-timed at 44.9 secs to smash the then four-year-old world record of 45.2 second. The auto-timing then showed that Davis had won 45.07 to 45.08.
But a few yards behind, there was another close finish.
Milkha Singh, the Flying Sikh, had started the race in…