As the Indian contingent heads to Beijing, Shivani Naik travels to Karad to bring us the touching story of the late Khashaba Jadhav, who won India’s first individual Olympic medal at Helsinki in 1952 but was never allowed to escape a life of poverty and obscurity

His life was tinged with red. But for Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav, independent India’s first individual Olympic medallist, the red mud in which he wrapped himself as he fell in love with the sport of wrestling, stayed truer and lingered longer than the darkened red of the bronze he won.

Post his triumph at Helsinki in 1952, the country allowed this man to rust, corroding his spirit if not his dignity. But as the years went by and the one individual medal shimmered brighter with each passing failure at the quadrennial event until Leander Paes cornered a bronze 44 years later in 1996, the legend reddened with time like good wine.

The wrestler from Karad in south-west Maharashtra won the nascent Indian nation its first individual honour at the biggest sporting stage but never once demanded his share of the prestige-pie. The country, shamelessly, mistook his modesty for muted silence and, as the years passed, forgot about him altogether.

Jadhav never really did speak much. “One for every 10-15 words spoken to him,” says his son Ranjit, sitting at his house Olympica Nivas at Karve Naka in Goleshwar village, Karad. Built from his life’s savings of 75,000 — his last pay-packet was Rs 1,784 and 20 paise after 27 years of service in the police — the wrestler never did get to reside in this house made after a lot of pocket-pinching and heartache. He was killed at age 59 in 1984 when riding pillion on a moped which collided with a truck. The house was then roofless, with just the bare walls.

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