Dingko Singh, a spark that set off a chain reaction in country
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: Vijender Singh vividly remembers that evening in 1998, when, as a boy in his early teens taking baby steps in boxing, he sat wide-eyed in front of a blackand-white TV in his home in Bhiwani, Haryana, and watched the bantamweight final of the Asian Games in Bangkok. A 19-year-old boxer called Dingko Singh was handily beating his opponent, Uzbekistan’s Timur Tulyakov.
“I kept saying, ‘Kya mara hai yaar!’, (Wow, look at that punch!)” Vijender recalled. “I can never forget that final. That very moment, I thought: if he is doing do it, why don’t I?” Some 2,500 kilometres away from Bhiwani, Suranjoy Singh paints a similar picture, only with a bigger setting in a village in Manipur. “There were about 40-odd kids, and a TV and generator was arranged for us just to watch the fight,” said Suranjoy. “I had just started boxing and his medal showed us that we can reach the stars.”
Suranjoy went on to win an Asian Games bronze and Commonwealth Games gold in 2010, while Vijender went a step higher, clinching a bronze at the 2008 Olympics.
The man who provided them with the spark to become boxers, Dingko Singh, died on Thursday at the age of 42 after a four-year long battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife, son and daughter.
Dingko’s 1998 gold — the first Asiad gold for Indian boxing in 16 years — had an outsized impact on the sport in the country. He inspired a whole generation of boxers who then went on to put India on the global map in amateur boxing. That list includes Vijender and Suranjoy, but also six-time world champion and Olympic medallist MC Mary Kom and former world and Asian champion L Sarita Devi (who was also coached by Dingko).
Two months ago, Suranjoy, now Indian Navy’s chief boxing coach, was part of a team of coaches that took permission and travelled from Mumbai to Imphal to visit the ailing Dingko at his home. His condition was worsening— he had suffered from Covid-19 in 2020 too — but Dingko was full of life, still talking about boxing.
“I want to do something for India. When I recover, I will start coaching again,” Suranjoy recalled Dingko telling him.
India may be an emerging boxing nation now, but inter
national achievements in the sport were few and far between in the 1990s, and Dingko’s medal was a major milestone. Dingko beat World Cup silver medallist and then World No. 3 Sontaya Wongprates of Thailand in the semi-final in his backyard before defeating Uzbek Tulyakov, who retired in the final.
“He was very passionate,” Gurbax Singh Sandhu, the longtime national boxing coach who was at the helm during the 1998 Asian Games, said. “He was a jolly person but once he lost his temper, he would listen to no one. If he believed something was wrong, he would not shy away from fighting for it — be it with me or the federation’s president. You have to handle such boxers with care.”
Like he had to be days before the Asian Games. Dingko would not have boarded the flight to Bangkok at all, he had been dropped from the Indian squad. It led to him going on a drinking spree and, as coaches close to him said, contemplate suicide. He was eventually added to the squad. L Ibomcha Singh, the Dronacharya boxing coach from Manipur, was one of the first to get a whiff of Dingko’s feistiness.