Bangkok Asian Games - 1970

Bangkok - 1970
Theme : India, First in Asia - Fellowship of the Royal Society

On May 2, 1918, Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He would be the first Asian to be elected to that prestigious scientific society.

Ramanujan (1887 - 1920) was one of modern India's greatest mathematical geniuses. He made substantial contributions to the analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. He gave his name to two constants, the Landau-Ramanujan constant and the Nielsen-Ramanujan constant. Before he died, Ramanujan wrote down about 600 theorems on loose sheets of paper, which were discovered and published only in 1976 as the "Lost Notebook" of Ramanujan.

The most famous anecdote on Ramanujan is related by mathematician G. H. Hardy, "I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

1970 Bangkok Asiad Hockey
Dates: December 9 - December 20, 1970
Athletes: 2,400 athletes from 18 countries
Debut Sport: Yachting
Top 3 Countries: Japan (74G, 47S, 23B), Korea (18G, 13S, 23B), Thailand (9G, 17S, 13B)
  • Korea was the original host of the 1970 Asian Games. Because of domestic reasons, it could not host the games, and Thailand stepped in yet again. Korea and a few other countries gave some financial support, and thus Bangkok staged the 1970 Asiad.

  • India's results in hockey were: beat Singapore 7-0, beat Sri Lanka 6-0 and beat Malaysia 2-0.

  • Pakistan's results were: beat Japan 3-0, beat Hong Kong 10-0 and drew with Thailand 0-0.

  • In the semi-finals, India beat Japan 1-0, while Pakistan beat Malaysia 5-0. In the final, Pakistan beat India 1-0 to regain its stranglehold on the Asian Games hockey gold.

Final Standings:

1 - Pakistan, 2 - India, 3 - Japan, 4 - Malaysia, 5 - Singapore, 6 - Sri Lanka, 7 - Hong Kong, 8 - Thailand

Indian Team:

Punjab Charles Cornelius, Vinod Kumar, Major Singh, Ajitpal Singh, Harmeek Singh, Balbir Singh, Baldev Singh, Kulwant Singh
Railways Harbinder Singh (captain), Balbir Singh
Services Harcharan Singh, M. P. Ganesh
Mumbai Cedric Perreira
Indian Airlines  P. Krishnamurthy
Officials Udham Singh (coach), Balbir Singh (manager)