SSC
Who won the first individual Olympic medal for independent India, in 1952?
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Answer: Option B — Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav
Detailed Solution
- D. Jadhav, a wrestler from Goleshwar village in Satara district, Maharashtra, won a bronze medal in the men's bantamweight freestyle wrestling event at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics in Finland. This was the first individual Olympic medal won by an athlete of independent India.
More about K. D. Jadhav:
He was born on 15 January 1926. He was known as "Pocket Dynamo" because of his small size and great energy.
He had also competed at the 1948 London Olympics, finishing sixth in the flyweight category.
His trip to the 1952 Olympics was funded partly by people of his village and by the Principal of his college, who mortgaged his house, because official support was limited.
After his wrestling career, he joined the Maharashtra Police and retired as an Assistant Commissioner.
He died in a road accident in 1984. He was given the Arjuna Award posthumously in 2001. The wrestling arena at the Indira Gandhi Sports Complex in Delhi, built for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, is named after him. In 2023, Google celebrated his birthday with a Google Doodle.
The next individual Olympic medal for India came 44 years later, when Leander Paes won bronze in tennis at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Earlier, in 1900, Norman Pritchard won two silver medals for (British) India, and the hockey team won team golds from 1928 onwards.
Why not the other options?
- ✗Milkha Singh finished fourth in the 400 m at the 1960 Rome Olympics and did not win a medal.
- ✗Karnam Malleswari won bronze in weightlifting in 2000 and was the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal.
- ✗Leander Paes won bronze in tennis in 1996, India's second individual medal after independence.
Quick tip
Remember: K. D. Jadhav = first individual Olympic medal for independent India, wrestling bronze, 1952 Helsinki, "Pocket Dynamo"; next individual medal = Leander Paes (1996).
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Sports — Preparation
This question tests your understanding of Sports, a key topic in the General Knowledge section. The detailed solution above uses a step-by-step approach to show the reasoning, and where available, a shortcut that helps you solve similar questions in under 90 seconds during the actual exam.
This topic covers sports GK: major tournaments and their venues, trophies and cups associated with each sport, sports terms, the number of players in a team, sports awards in India, Olympic and Asian Games facts, and famous sportspersons and their achievements. Common questions ask which sport a trophy belongs to (such as the Durand Cup for football or the Ranji Trophy for cricket), which term is used in which sport, and where a tournament was held. Records and results change after every season, so pair static facts such as team sizes and terms with recent results from current affairs. Practise the sports questions below, written in the style of the general awareness sections of exams such as SSC, banking, railways, CUET GAT, MAH CET and CLAT. Each question comes with a detailed explanation that adds related facts, so every question helps you revise more than one point.