Bengaluru, July 16: The 1936 Berlin Olympics held in the backdrop of Adolf Hitler's Nazi theory had many anti-heroes including India's legendary hockey great Dhyan Chand.
When Hitler commissioned Nazi Germany's favourite film director Leni Reifanstahl to document the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels could not have imagined that there would be another nation, apart from the USA, refusing to salute the Fuhrer.
The British India contingent comprised a bunch of inexperienced athletes with only shining glory being a two-time champion hockey team led by its resident magician Major Dhyan Chand.
The global media's focus was the United Stated of America refusing the traditional right-arm salute to Hitler during the opening ceremony, but who would have thought that a contingent of amateur athletes wearing golden Kullahs and light blue turban would do the unthinkable.
The contingent, with its flag-bearer Dhyan Chand, refused to salute and it was more of an emotional decision than political, taken by the team when the entire Third Reichsang the two national hymns Deutschland and Horst Wessel Lied.
For Dhyan Chand, what the score-line of India matches in that Olympics would not reveal is the tremendous pressure that he faced as media reports suggested that the defending champions were no longer invincible.
Legend has it that Dhyan Chand wanted better speed and mobility, and hence, wore a rubber soled sneakers sacrificing the conventional spike boots on grass field.
It helped him dribble at great speed. He scored a dozen and the Morning Post match report had some unforgettable lines.
"These players it's said glided over turf as if it is a skating rink and the flickering sticks had the Japanese, normally so agile, mesmerized."
Dhyan Chand was on top of the world, his place in the annals secured.
He was 'Captain Marvel' and accepted in every echelons of the society that once discriminated against him. Before Delhi's National Stadium, Austria's capital city Vienna had the statue of Dhyan Chand erected.
The PTI news agency reports that Dhyan Chand never met Hitler in person and the story of Hitler offering him a position in German Army, according to scholars and researchers, is an urban myth.