Kapil Dev to Prakash Padukone: Meet India's first gamechangers

Orphaned during the Partition violence of 1947, Milkha Singh brought home gold medals from the 1958 Asian and Commonwealth Games, and came agonisingly close to an Olympic medal, missing out by one-tenth of a second, at the 1960 Games in Rome. Now 91, Singh recalls the words of his friend and hockey wizard Dhyan Chand, who would practise hitting 500 balls through a tyre every day. "It's the same with me. I practised like there's no tomorrow, and often I would vomit blood and had to be put on oxygen."

Growing up in Chennai in the 50s and 60s, Vijay Amritraj was aiming to play tennis professionally, something no one during his time had heard of. "Yes you play tennis, but what do you do for a living?’ most people would ask me,” says Amritraj, India's highest-ranked professional singles player ever. Through his storied career in the 1970s and 80s, in which he reached the quarterfinals of the Wimbledon twice, Amritraj was considered the 'A' of the ABC of world tennis, legends [Bjorn] Borg and [Jimmy] Connors constituting the other two of the troika

PT Usha was a sickly child who was introduced to running by her parents, who turned a deaf ear to detractors. They sent her to a training camp in Kannur, about an hour and a half away from her home. "My neighbours discouraged my mother from sending a girl away," says Usha.  The Payyoli Express, as Usha is fondly called, vindicated her parents' faith when, in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984, she ran a sterling race and missed a podium finish by one-hundredth of a second. Till this day, she remains among India's most successful international athletes

Prakash Padukone is India's first winner of the All England championships, the most prestigious badminton tournament, received a state reception on his return to Bengaluru after winning the title. Padukone, who started playing the game at 7 at a wedding hall-turned-court in the city's Malleshwaram area, was taken in an open jeep from the airport to the Vidhan Soudha, where the chief minister received him. "It was something unheard of in the 1980s, that too for a badminton player," says Padukone. "The All-England victory was one of the turning points for badminton in India."

When Viswanathan Anand started playing chess, India didn't have a single grandmaster and computers were non-existent in the country. The year Anand became grandmaster, in 1988, was also the first he got to practice on a computer. “[Till then], books were the only source of chess knowledge,” says Anand. This means that his world-beating feat came from reading seminal chess literature like Chess Openings: Theory and Practice by Israel Albert Horowitz, which his sister bought for him from a local bookstore, or José Raúl Capablanca’s Chess Fundamentals, among others

At 15, Abhinav Bindra, India's first Individual Olympic gold medallist, left Chandigarh and headed for the German town of Wiesbaden to train. Some years later, he ditched his plush home in favour of a small room with a bunk bed at an air force barracks-turned-training facility in Colorado Springs, US, where he got to train with and learn from US Olympic athletes. Finally, in preparation for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where he won his medal, Bindra converted a wedding hall in his hometown into a shooting range to simulate the gigantic arena in which the Olympic final was held. “Such large spaces overwhelm a shooter and upset their balance. That’s why I had to prepare,” says Bindra. “That’s also probably the closest I’ve come to marriage.”