India hockey's total domination at Asian Games 2023 is a sign of greater things to come

At the Asian Games, Hardik was the team’s midfield engine, finding visionary passes, running rings around teams with his dribbling, and transitioning from a defensive position to an attacking attempt with blistering runs through the middle—Hardik was everywhere. It took work to get to this performance.

“My strength is dribbling, but modern hockey is so much more about passing,” Hardik said in an interview just before leaving for Hangzhou for the Asian Games. “Under our new coach (South Africa’s Craig Fulton took charge last year), I got to learn a lot about finding the right positions, finding the right passes, but also the right moments when it was necessary to dribble, or to carry the ball forward. These are the on-field decisions that make the difference between winning and losing.”

Sometimes, the over-sized influence Hardik’s creative play has on the team’s attacking prowess can become a burden—India were cruising in the home World Cup in January (including an 8-0 drubbing of Japan) before a hamstring injury ruled out Hardik after the final group match. In the very next knockout match, a Hardik-less India could not go past New Zealand. At the Asian Champions Trophy in Chennai in August, where the six highest-ranked teams in Asia are pitted against each other, Hardik was again engineering India’s attacks, and India were unbeatable.

But it’s this win at the Asian Games, the first gold since 2014, and the fourth overall, that will make young Hardik’s homecoming an absolute blast.

His entire extended family in the village of Khusropur in Punjab’s Jalandhar district is steeped in hockey. His grandfather was a hockey coach and father Varinderpreet played for India. His uncle and mentor Jugraj Singh had the reputation of being one of the best drag-flickers India has ever seen, and won the 2002 Asian Games silver. Aunt Rajbir Kaur led the Indian women’s hockey team with distinction and won the 1982 Asian Games gold in Delhi. Her husband Gurmail Singh won the last of India’s Olympic gold medals in hockey in 1980.

“Growing up, it’s all I ever knew—hockey,” said Hardik, laughing. “Now I find it difficult to survive in the house. If we are all eating dinner, let’s say, everyone will be telling me what I did well, what I did not do well, what I could have done, or what I should have done. I tell them, why don’t you do it yourself, then?

“But seriously, I can’t express to you how happy everyone will be, how amazing it will be at home.”

Sukhjeet: A redemption song

While the Indian team’s strength is the availability of solid players in each position—from the inspirational P.R. Sreejesh in goal, to captain Harmanpreet Singh’s superb defending and generous goalscoring from penalty corners, to the excellent poaching work by Mandeep Singh or Abhishek, for one player, the Asian Games gold will feel like the realisation of an impossible dream.

Sukhjeet Singh, 26, has emerged in the last year as one of India’s most prominent forward players—he scored in just about every match in the world cup and the Asian Champions Trophy—and at Hangzhou, he was a pest for the other teams, constantly troubling them in the D, winning balls, winning deflections, and getting into superb attacking positions.

A few years earlier, Sukhjeet lay nearly paralyzed from the waist down, in a hospital bed, sure that his hockey dreams had been nipped in the bud.

Back in 2018, Sukhjeet had got a dream call up to the senior Indian camp, a first for the Punjab forward, who had not been part of India’s junior set-up. Five or six days in the camp and Sukhjeet had a bizarre accident—during a physiotherapy session, he felt an acute pain in his right leg. Sukhjeet decided to ride through the pain and went into practice for 3-4 more days, before he came down with high fever, terrible pain in the leg, acute swelling, and eventually, an inability to move at all. Doctors worked on getting his infection under control but could not promise how complete the recovery would be.

“The next 6-7 months were the worst time of my life, I did not know that such a bad time was possible,” Sukhjeet said. “Forget walking, I could not get up from the bed, and I thought that my career is over before it started…”

Soon, due to practical considerations, Sukhjeet’s name was removed from the national camp, even as he lay in bed at home, recovering. He had been advised bed rest for six months, and then a slow road back to regaining strength and fitness.

“My father-saab motivated me, he is the one who got me out of this, and a couple of friends also, they understood that I had slid to a very bad space, and they constantly encouraged me, they said that your career has just started, and you will rise back again, this is a learning experience,” Sukhjeet said. “I learnt something very important, to see the support I had when I was completely broken, and that it was possible to surmount the worst challenges.”

At home, Sukhjeet’s father Ajit Singh, a former hockey player himself, took charge of his son’s rehabilitation, just as he had introduced his son to the game at age 6, teaching the child the basics with a hockey stick sawed off to size. “He had to teach me how to walk again,” Sukhjeet said. “From there, slowly, we started going to the gym, and then to the grounds.”

In 2019, Sukhjit started playing again, for his employers Punjab National Bank. But just as he was making a comeback, another disaster struck—the pandemic.

“But it was something that worked in my favour,” Sukhjeet said. “Because I could continue to work on my comeback without having to think of anything else. I continued working with my father at the gym, and because he was in Punjab police, we could also access the ground for practice. He was my coach, physio, role model. Everything is because of him.”

It was Sukhjeet’s father who dreamt of playing for India, representing the nation at the Olympics. That was not to be, but the dream lives on in the most glorious way with his son, now headed to Paris 2024 as part of Asia’s best team.