Milkha Singh
The 'Flying Sikh', a Partition orphan from Muzaffargarh who became Asia's greatest sprinter and missed an Olympic medal in Rome by a fraction of a second.
Milkha Singh was born around 1929 in Govindpura near Muzaffargarh, now in Pakistan. In the Partition violence of 1947 his parents and several brothers and sisters were killed in front of him. He fled to Delhi as an orphan and lived in refugee camps.
He joined the army and discovered he could run. He won gold at the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff in 1958, the first for independent India, and Asian Games golds. At the Rome Olympics in 1960 he finished fourth in the 400 metres by a fraction of a second. In 1960 he raced in Lahore and was called the Flying Sikh by General Ayub Khan.
He died of Covid in 2021 at ninety-one, five days after his wife, the volleyball captain Nirmal Kaur.