celebrated the 97th birthday of Indian wrestler Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav, who earned his country's first individual Olympic medal following Independence at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
Jadhav, well known by his stage name "Pocket Dynamo," was born on January 15, 1926, in the Maharashtrian village of Goleshwar. There, together with his father, who was also a wrestler in the neighbourhood, he started his wrestling training.
Jadhav's first encounter with the London Olympics occurred in 1948 after he had achieved victory in State and National level competitions. Jadhav was taught in London by Rees Gardner, a former lightweight World champion from the United States. Under Gardner's guidance, he finished sixth in the flyweight division.
Over the next four years, while he prepared for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Jadhav moved up in weight class to bantamweight, where he faced more international wrestlers. He was able to visit Helsinki because to community backing, and the Maharaja of Patiala provided him the eligibility-enabling break. Jadahav's college's principal, Raja Ram College, further mortgaged his home for 7,000 rupees, and his friends and the shopkeepers of Karad made arrangements for his kit. In Helsinki, Jadhav breezed through the first five rounds, winning almost all of the other contests in under five minutes. Then Shohachi Ishii of Japan gave a challenging test.
The bout lasted more than 15 minutes, and Ishii won the gold with a one-point victory over Jadhav. Jadhav was then instructed to get back on the mat and wrestle Rashid Mammadbeyov of the Soviet Union. There was no Indian official there to argue that the rules demanded a minimum 30-minute pause between rounds. Due to his exhaustion, Jadhav was unable to motivate his team, and Mammadbeyov profited on his opportunity to advance to the final, giving the former a bronze medal.
As he celebrated his triumph, Goleshwar rode a bullock cart through the neighbourhood.
Unfortunately, Jadhav's wrestling career came to an end when he injured his knee just in time for the Olympics the following year. He was a police officer before he was killed in an accident in 1984. The Maharashtra state government awarded him a posthumous Chhatrapati Puraskar in 1992–1993. The wrestling arena built for the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games bears his name.