XercizE Sports Special : Leslie Claudius, at 85 He smiled to death George Elliot once said , "Our dead are never

dead to us, until we have forgotte n them."Thus , Leslie Claudius shall never be dead. Hockey fraternity this week mourned the death of legendary Leslie Claudius with players across all generations terming that the passing away of triple Olympic g old medallist marked the end of an era.He was small in size but lion-hearted in effort wielding the stick from the right-half. Leslie Claudius hailed from an er a where aIndia ruled the world of hockey.Many played hockey for glamour and mone y, he .... played it for passion. Claudius, from various accounts available, was an upright man, who firmly believ ed one could achieve one s ambitions on the sports field with hard work. There was no substitute to training and competing with the same fervour. They said he was born to play hockey.At the 1960 Rome Olympics, Leslie Claudius, captain of the Indian hockey team, was disconsolate. He had just led the team to a silver medal finish. I never thought I would win a silver medal under my captaincy, he told a reporter from The Times of India in 2000. I was so unlucky. I just can t explain it. As the legendary Dhyan Chand, no mean wielder of the stick himself, said while p icking the Indian team for the 1948 Games: Claudius selects himself, now I have t o select the rest of the team. An Anglo-Indian, Claudius was a member of three Olympic gold medal-winning India n teams - London (1948), Helsinki (1952) and Melbourne (1956). At Rome (1960), h e led India to a silver medal finish. Claudius is in the Guinness World Records along with Udham Singh for having won the most Olympic medals in hockey. Claudius was among the legendary trio of Indi an hockey along with Major Dhyan Chand and Roop Singh. Leslie Claudius may be dead but after all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.I knew a man who once said, death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back.